To Sli or Not to Sli

[lem06]

SLI or Crossfire would work fine ( Both the Same )

SLI (Scan Line Interleave) was originally from a company called 3DFX. They made the first SLI cards IE: VOODOO VIDEO CARDS!! I ran 2 Voodoo 3500 Sli Cards

yeah i had the Voodoo blackmagic sli cards and back then it made the graphic allsome. thats what making me want the sli also.

[isp_of_doom]

was voodoo SLI 2x the performance?

[GrimReaper]

I know that for SLIing you must have two equal cards, but is true that the 2 cards have the same clock, but different ram.....pay attention

DOH!!! yes they have to be the same card and same speed!! DOH!

Ok think about this dude

1. you have 1 gig of ram on your mother board running at 400mhz
now you want to add another gig of ram running at 300mhz

Question:

What speed will your ram be running at?

hehehehehehe

[RoadKillGrill]

How important is SLI for dual monitors? (when running games on 1 of those monitors)

SLI only supports one monitor. You cannot dual monitor with sli enabled.

[Brutal]

SLI only supports one monitor. You cannot dual monitor with sli enabled.

Are you 100% sure it doesn't support dual monitor ?

[Velocitas]

Don't waste your money. Save the cash you would've spent on that 2nd video card (and SLI motherboard) and put it towards a future upgrade.

The performance gains, IMO, aren't worth the extra money you'd spend. In most cases you'll be lucky to see a 30% performance gain when you've spent at least double what you would've if you went with a single-card setup.

Save your money, and once your performance begins to be less than satisfactory..get an upgrade. SLI setups simply aren't necessary.

[nthexwn]

IMO the only practical function of SLI is to give millionaires a slight performance edge.

SLI as a midrange solution is never cost effective for the performance you'll gain versus a comparable standalone card.

SLI as an upgrade solution is also not cost effective. Prices rarely fall in line with next-gen performance gains, so you're usually better off buying a next-gen card than adding in a 2nd card from the previous generation.

...

So unless you absolutely need the best performance on earth at any given time (dual 8800 ultras at present) then you can pretty much rule SLI out, and that's before factoring in compatible motherboards, power supplies, drivers, operating system issues, games, etc...

[RoadKillGrill]

Are you 100% sure it doesn't support dual monitor ?

YES, I have access to an SLI system and I was awfully ****** when I plugged 4 monitors in and I needed to disable SLI to use them all at once.

[isp_of_doom]

YES, I have access to an SLI system and I was awfully ****** when I plugged 4 monitors in and I needed to disable SLI to use them all at once.

but you can still have 2 GPU's in your comp each running a monitor (so that wouldn't strictly be SLI?)

[KriLL3.8™]

If you turn on SLI one card looses the use of it's ports, since it's no longer rendering for those ports, it's aiding in the render for the 2 ports on the other card.

You can have a SLI setup + a PCI/PCI-e card to run 4 screens.

[lem06]

Thanks everyone for ur comments

I went with the one card:
BFG BFGE88768UOCE GeForce 8800 Ultra 768MB GDDR3 PCI Express x16 Video Card.

I can always add add another if i deem it nessary

[oldkawman1]

Are you 100% sure it doesn't support dual monitor ?

Correct, 100% sure it does not. SLI and Multi GPU only support 1 monitor, no twinview.

[Brutal]

Good i have that clear now ty

[RoadKillGrill]

You can have a SLI setup + a PCI/PCI-e card to run 3 screens.

Fixed :P the sli will only allow one output from both cards.

This also requires 3 video cards.... At this point you are just ******* money away, even if the 3rd one is free from an old comp the power consumption would and heat would be outrageous.

[TWD]

I was just talking to Brizz who was at this event at Epic's place playing UT3. He was playing the game on a system with the 8800 GTS. To be short on details I think you are all going to be very surprised at how well the game will run on such a high end videocard. In fact Brizz said that he had almost everything maxed out and it never dropped below 60. Having two of these things isn't going to make the game any more enjoyable for you. It would be a complete waste of money. Save it for something else.