Sli mode?

Hi,

bit confused so i thought i'd look it up on the net, my new motherboard supports 2 graphics card, but what i need to understand is, why 2? do they work together, like a car amp does when you " bridge " them together to get more power?. i was thinking of just one deacent card, or should i go for 2 less expensive cards. or 1 good card to start with, and in the future add another card so ill have 2 good cards.

p/s . please dont reply with a technical reason, i wont understand, keep it simple lol

You would be better off to get a single high-end card and use the upgrade opportunity of adding a second card during a later time when it's more needed. Also in the future the cost of today's high end card will continually become cheaper, so as long as you have a graphics card that matches at some point you will be fine. Keep in mind, you cannot use two different graphics cards in SLI

7800GTX + 7800GTX = Fine
7900GTX + 7600GT (I think it GT or GS or something)= Won't work

And don't try to add a Radeon-brand card, thats like adding something totally different.


Can anyone confirm that I'm correct on that? As I'm not 100% sure but I got the idea

The board i'm useing isnt something i have seen before, but something which has all the features i want / need so i'm happy with it.

http://www.directron.com/tforce4u.html

do 2 cards together raid? as harddrives do and become faster?

the option of 1 good card is probaly what i'll swing towards as i need a 500watt + power pack to run 2 cards at once and i only have a 400 or a 450 watt powerpack and dont really want to buy loads more than i need to at the moment.

....also as you stated , cards will become cheaper.

My main aim is so i can use my pc as a TV , good gameing machine and watch the odd film on it.

and seeing as ive got a thread open, can i introduce something else into the conversation. Will i be able to overclock it i ever wanted to by useing just a heatsink and fan costing no more than 20 quid, or do i have to get into the big boys game and start messing with watercolling but my 2 reasons for not wanting water cooling are

1. if they leak - well that explains its self.
2. why wast 100 or more on water cooling so you can overclock, why not take the cash from the origonal cpu you was going to buy and the water cooling system and buy a faster cpu.

Thank you. but be prepered for many questions

As far as I know, SLi on some games DOES give you up to twice the power and in other games its not so much and in older games no improvements at all.

There are supposed to be around 100 games that will get a boost from two graphics cards.

Call Of Duty 2 and I think The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion support SLi.


As far as mixing cards, you cannot mix different cards for example you cannot mix an ATi card with a Nvidia card or you couldn't mix a 6600GT and a 6800GT.

Sorry if I've made things even more confusing, but bluntly speaking, SLi is still a relatively new technology and as such there are few games that will see a noticeable improvement in the way of performance.

So it will be best to wait until prices of the graphics cards come down or when more games support it :)

The board you linked to doesn't support SLI?:confused:

And yes, you can try overclocking with a £20 heatsink. Athlon 64s run pretty cool in general. As for SLI, I'd buy one pretty good board, and add another one down the line as and when you need one - right now the 7900GT is the real sweet spot for performance vs. value.

Nvidia have an excellent site for all things SLI which can be found at the following link ;

http://www.slizone.com/page/slizone_learn.html

This explains what you can and cannot do with SLI, how it works in quite easy to understand terminology, and has quite a few small flash video's showing different things :)

As for game support, there is more games out there that support SLI than you think really - and here's a quick list of supported titles ;

http://www.slizone.com/object/slizone2_game.html

Hope this information helps :)

Edited : Guy now confirms he has a SLI mobo:undecided

just checked, that isnt my board, myn does support sli as it has a card which slides in and out for SLi mode and also the power which needs to be connected to the motherboard when useing sli mode

Ive decided i'll go with one good ( ish ) card for now and add another of the same cad in the near future. which would be the best graphics card with a limit of around £100, looked on ebay but i dont really know what they are new so dont wana be getting ripped of.