SLI...beware!!

[starseed419]

Hey all. Not new to the forums, but this is my first post in the hardware section. I was shopping newegg last night, as I am coming into a nice reenlistment bonus next month and want to build my dream system. While shopping, I stumbled onto an ASUS mobo that claimed it was SLI compatible. Guess I'm not keeping up with the times as I should be, so I did some research. Turns out SLI is a dual PCI-express video card setup, utilizing the NVIDIA 6600 and 6800 cards. Dual cards??!! Wow, that sounds awesome. Nothing like doubling your GPU power, right? Wrong! Before I made up my mind to get this board and 1K$ worth of video cards, I decided to do some more research. Hopped on over to tomshardware.com and read the article about SLI. Turns out SLI is a great thing, IF you have one of the very few games that support this new technology. Turns out, the testers at Tom's even saw a decrease in performance while playing FS9 with SLI enabled. FS9 is not SLI compatible at the moment, and may never be. So a warning to those who want to go this route in search of better frame rates: do your homework before forking over an extra 500 bones. You'll be happy you did. Do I still plan to get the SLI? Not sure yet. But now at least I won't be upset when it doesn't do anything for my FS9 experience.

[the_autopilot]

Yes, right now it only supports a few games. BUt those fews games are the ones it that get the most benefit out of SLI like Doom3 and Half life 2 and 50 others games. Games that aren't supported like unreal torny don't even need a single 6800 ultra to play on the highest settings.

SLI is overkill for most games out there including fs9. There's no reason to get SLI for fs9. A single x850 xt PE does awesomely at the highest settings and is cheaper.

As for whether its worth getting SLI...depends on you. SLI is asimed at the enthusisust audenice, not the maintstream or even the power user.

I got SLI and have no complaints. Even though there is a decrease in perfermence, SLI still does very well (far from being crappy). Getting SLI also futureproofs you. You won't have to upgrade for some time. Even Epic's next generation Unreal 3 engine runs great on SLI and thats engine is targeted for 2006 and is entirely based on dx9 (no support for dx8/7)

[Ivan]

SLI is fun for FS9... when you remove the SLI connector and put a good monitor on each output connector  ;D

[SilverFox441]

SLI was largely a waste of time/money in it's first incarnation in the old Voodoo card days. Very few programs ever supported it and the pace of technological development meant that it was doomed to be overhauled by a single card solution within just a few months.

I don't see the modern version of SLI faring any better.  SLI is a massive investment and is limited to the lifetime of the card(s). I'm far more interested in the multi-monitor aspects of a PCI-X installation with multiple cards.

[4_Series_Scania]

[quote]SLI was largely a waste of time/money in it's first incarnation in the old Voodoo card days. Very few programs ever supported it and the pace of technological development meant that it was doomed to be overhauled by a single card solution within just a few months.

I don't see the modern version of SLI faring any better.

[SilverFox441]

I had an SLI setup as well...

Damn thing was obsolete before I even finished tweaking it for all the games I played! In those days it was compatable with everything as well.

Just remember, one of SLI's main features is to double the cost of staying at the top of the horsepower curve.

Kinda pointless when any framerate above 60HZ is wasted due to visual persistence. The human eye just can't see any faster, so why display it?

[the_autopilot]

SLI was largely a waste of time/money in it's first incarnation in the old Voodoo card days. Very few programs ever supported it and the pace of technological development meant that it was doomed to be overhauled by a single card solution within just a few months.

I don't see the modern version of SLI faring any better.  SLI is a massive investment and is limited to the lifetime of the card(s). I'm far more interested in the multi-monitor aspects of a PCI-X installation with multiple cards.

True, but I get bragging rights.

My computer is better than yours. Muhhahahaha.

Ok, seriously now, nvidia has invested quite a bit into this and it seems like their next-generation cards will support it as well. So even if their next-generation card beats an SLI of this generation's cards, the next generation will have SLI support and still be awesome.

[Rivers]

The most extreme with 6800 Ultra and GT SLI in my opinion has a big problem, and it

[Ivan]

SLI was used to overcome the capacity problems the Voodoo 2 had when going past the 800x600 resolution. Has something to do with the maximum addressable memory size and the way the memory was used on these.

SLI support is done by drivers, not by the game itself. If you want 1GB texture memory, get 2 512MB PCI-E nVidia cards that support SLI... but don't count on a big increase in framerate, as there are a lot of things that have influence on that (including the quality of your motherboard wiring)