Features - QOTW: Have you ever used SLI or CrossFire?

[deejayburnout]

never ran more than 1 card, however i am so tempted by 3 screens that might get another 7850.

However...

a 7950 or higher might be better than xfire for stability

[badass]

Multi card was never practical for me, despite always having motherboards that could do it. In the early days of bitcoin mining I considered it but despite my antec p180 being huge and heavy, the motherboard's second full length PCIe slot was too close to the bottom. Now I have a Silverstone SG02-F and despite the mATX motherboard having 2 full length slots, it would be too hot and noisy for a second card.
For gaming, I would never bother. Too much fiddling to get things working properly. Single card every time for me.

[LowMoralFibre]

While it can be a logistical nightmare I've never had too much trouble getting two cards to work. PC gaming is full of potential pitfalls and two cards has never been a major one for me.

[Mentawl]

Recently went from a pair of 670s to a single 780, haven't regretted it for a second. Although the "maximum" FPS may have gone down slightly, the experience is much better.

[CampGareth]

Aye, SLI GTX 680Ms here, only bitten me twice, once was with Trackmania Stadium 2 which on release had a framerate of 20fps on all sli systems, and the other time was the five faces ray tracing demo because it's technically impossible to support sli for ray tracing iirc so I had half a reasonable framerate.

[Kovoet]

I had a 7950GX2 back in the day, so technically it was SLI even though it was a single 'card' (again debatable).

It was fine, I was very happy with the scaling over my 7900GT and I never experienced any microstutter - although it must be said at the time I was too busy gawping at Crysis running in 'High' settings (not very high).

I imagine things have moved on immensely since then and so I wouldn't hesitate to use a multi-GPU setup in the future although as I have a 1080p monitor my 7970 is pretty much overkill for the time being.

Awesome card it was as well

[Output]

Never, and I don't intend to either.

I'm happy with the performance I get from a single card, so don't feel I have a need that would justify a multi-GPU setup.

[Smikis]

running sli, in reality sli optimization is so poor, only 1 out of 20 games actually use cards properly, best in recent years would be sc2, ( all of them were good for sli on that card release, seems old cards dont inherit new adaptations or some other jumbo, go figure ) and then there is always issue of no sli drivers, oh you got into mmorpg beta, np enjoy having no sli for half a year, oh this new game come out, day one you say? day 20 says nvidia sli.... yes there are games that have support half year to release, but those are barely 20% of games released

i was planning going single card only, then i saw 770gtx sli, and that scaling looks great, but i do fear there wont be any proper scaling in 2 years, both cards will run at 55-60% which is practically same as single card, + slow sli profile updates, and games that dont support sli at all,

[Hardware_Elite]

no, but when i buy my 2nd 680 i will be for the first time.

[martian_aphid]

Always used the best single card I could get in the past but I just tried out SLI recently. I think it is slightly overkill for my current resolution but its good to know I have headroom for the future as we begin to transition to displays with a denser pixel pitch.

[piggin23]

Run a few different SLi systems

2 x 280's
2 x 580's

& now

3 x 680's

[Spreadie]

Yeap - in the first release of SLI I used 2 x voodoo 2 cards to give better performance in quake.

After that it was a high end single card for a few years before using SLI again with the 6600GT series.

Pretty much the same here - I also had a GTX 295.

The ultra high prices of Nvidia's 780s and Titans are probably making more people consider SLI with cheaper cards - 670/760/680/770

[Biscuit]

Currently running 2 x GTX660Ti

Havent really pushed it to itsd max potential but the lack of stability vs single card was definitely noticable. It tends to be game specific on how well it will work really.

[Myss_tree]

No need for sli / crossfire ... i have a life.

[krsboss]

...when I built this PC there wasn't a 'single' graphics card that would allow me to play games on max settings with acceptable FPS at 1440p...so I have SLI 680s...I had SLI 470s back some time ago, but was only running 1080p then so a single highly clocked 580 was able to manage after!

The only downside to 2-way SLI from my experience is the cost of upgrading...now instead of just having to buy 1 new graphics card, I'm going to have to buy two!

[Elspuddy]

I have not crossfire any thing yet, want to , I got 2x 6870's but my psu can only power one of them