The biggest short-lived fads in PC hardware history

pcinvasion.com:

PC hardware is an ever-changing landscape full of ideas that manage to propel the industry forward. However, there are times when great ideas can quickly wither away into obscurity. And there are plenty of examples of PC hardware fads that came and went, to the point where it’s easy to forget that a particular bit of tech came out at all.

And sometimes it’s fun to take a look back through the trends of tech and see what didn’t work out. We can reminisce about some bits of PC hardware that were nothing more than popular fads. Now fads aren’t necessarily a bad thing, since you never know what’s going to stick the landing. But we can all think back to a purchase that, in hindsight, was a bad decision. So let’s take a walk through memory lane and take a look at some of the biggest fads in PC hardware history.

Right off the bat, we’re getting into the weeds of PC hardware. Nvidia’s SLI (Scalable Link Interface) first appeared in 2004 and allowed the user to hook up multiple graphics cards to the same PC. Using SLI, you could have two, three, or even four graphics cards in your rig working at once. It seems crazy to think about owning just one RTX 3080 Ti right now, let alone multiple, even as the supply situation steadily improves. Unfortunately, Nvidia phased out SLI with the RTX 20 Series cards, so that dream won’t become a reality.

(Image credit: Nvidia)

In an SLI setup, each graphics card renders a different part of the screen. For a 2-way SLI system, one card would render the top horizontal half of the screen, while the other would render the bottom half. This method is known as split frame rendering, and there’s also alternate frame rendering where each GPU would handle its own set of frames in a sequence. This gave