To SLi or not to SLi

[[GSV]Trig]

I'm on the verge of doing a bit of an upgrade...

I dunno if I wanna got for SLI or not tho, new board will have PCI-E on it even tho I havent decided which board yet or if I'll go SLI..

SLI is NVidia only right?
SO do I get a card thats the same kinda performance as my 9800 Pro for now n then get another one a bit later or do I just stick with a single PCI-E and get a card thats comparative to the 9800 Pro?

And whats all this Hypermemory rubbish, just looks like a semi onboard kinda thing to me, card has 32mb on it but when it needs more it looks to system memory pretty much yeah?

[DavidM]

And whats all this Hypermemory rubbish, just looks like a semi onboard kinda thing to me, card has 32mb on it but when it needs more it looks to system memory pretty much yeah?

Essentially as PCI-E has a higher bandwidth than older interfaces, it will give a pretty fast access to onboard memory.

Slightly slower than actual memory on the card, but only slightly - and you save on the card of course.

[Dougal]

SLi is Nvidia NF4 SLI chipset only, not the Ultra IIRC.

You can get a single card in an sli board as there is a little card thing on the board that you can flip round if you want SLi enabled or just want to use one PCIE card.

My friend currently has a single 6800GT in his system and is saving up for a secondary one so it works fine atm.

[[GSV]Trig]

And whats all this about SLI cards wanting stupid amounts of power..?
I've got an Enermax 440 atm but have an Antec 550TP laying about, dont see why I should need more than that tbh...

Current system is fine but got the chance to sort of sidegrade it a little bit...
3200 Winchester
AV8-3rd Eye
1Gb RAM
9800 Pro 128Mb

Going to
3200 Venice
2Gb RAM
PCI-E Board
Unknown GFX at this point...

[Dougal]

Personally I would get a PSU that states its SLi compatable. Check ur manufacturer.

[Lee H]

It depends on the rails as PCI-E based cards are quite thirsty and require some power for them to function correctly. Don't forget that PCI-E is a "new" power connection as well and is 6 Pin with 2 +12v connections and various other voltages



Thats what the PCI-E power connection looks like on a card. You can use a 24 pin ATX PSU without a PCI-E power connection by using something like the following cable ;



It is advisable when using this connection to put them on seperate rails as to balance the power drawn.

As for the "hypertransport" system - All the relevent information and technical diagrams can be found Here

Hope this info helps

[DavidM]

Do you mean Hypertransport, Hyperthreading or Turbo Cache?

[[GSV]Trig]

Mmmm, dont really wanna be changing PSU's as well tbh, can see this costing more than I originally anticipated...

Looks like the X700 PCI-E is about the same as the 9800 Pro card, could do with a nice chart with AGP/PCI-E cards in it tbh....


Thanks for the HyperTransport link btw, knew what that was, was looking at HyperMemory

[DavidM]

If you mean TurboCache - check the link for info

[oralpain]

No real point in going SLI right form the get go.

A single 6600GT or 6800 will give much better perfromance than SLI 6200s and wont cost much more.

A 6800GT/ultra give similar or better performance than a SLI 6600GTs, for the same or less money.

A 7800GTX gives similar performance to sli 6800Gts/ultras for less.

SLI works best it you pick a reasonable card now, then add another one down the road when prices are much lower, or as a gimmick, or for people who have obcene amounts of money.

Hypermemory cards arent all that great, even at their price point.

[[GSV]Trig]

Yeah the whole SLI idea isnt appealing to me atm really, there'll always be a point down the road tho that I can jump on that wagon if the need arises...

Lemme go crunch some numbers n well see where we are...

[DavidM]

Turbo Cache is nVidia

Hypermemory is ATI

[[GSV]Trig]

Both appear to be a way of boosting cheaper cards by suplimenting there onboard memory with system memory to me, not really read either link in detail, ideal for laptops I guess but seeing as I'm looking at 9800Pro kinda performance not really relivent in this situation...

[darrensen]

Well this is what im going to do......

I currently have a one 6800GT, i am going to use this card until the 7800's come down in price. The thing with SLi, you need to have two cards with the same firmware. The best way to do this is buy two at the same time.

The 6800GT's are at a great price at the moment. Maybe think about buying one of them and later once you have saved some money buy two 7800's when the price drops, or wait for the crossfire mobos to be made.

[Lee H]

I have 2 systems both are AMD64 3500+ with 6800GT's but only 1 has the Asus A8N Deluxe SLI board. I tend to "borrow" the graphics card from the smaller system when its not in use and have a dabble with SLI when theres nothing much else to do apart from go play games for a few hours

[Butcher]

Essentially as PCI-E has a higher bandwidth than older interfaces, it will give a pretty fast access to onboard memory.

Slightly slower than actual memory on the card, but only slightly - and you save on the card of course.

Slightly? Don't kid yourself. The PCI-e channel going flat out is not even close to the bandwidth of a typical PCI-e gfx card (pci-e 16x is 5GB/s, gfx memory bandwidth is typically >12GB/s on low end cards). And you can't burn all the bandwidth on turbocache or hypermem anyway as the CPU still needs to send commands and data to the card.
It's a good way to extend the capabilities of low end cards, but fast it is most definitely not.