Hi everyone, I have just bought a second GeFoce 7800GTX (not delivered yet) and have an Asus AN8-Sli Deluxe mobo. Anyone had any problems getting the Sli mode to work? Also there are two PCI-e slots (obviously P) but only one supports PCI-e 16x while the other is only PCI-e 1x. Surely it would have been better performance wise to have both 16x as this may cause a performance bottle neck on the 2 cards?? I put my single card in the 1x slot by mistake at first and the performance was about half what it is when I'd placed it correctly in the 16x slot. Will this not happen with the second card? So it will be like having 1.5 cards rather than 2. Please tell me the NVidia already thought of this!? Having not used Sli mode as yet I pose this question to those 'in the know'! Cheers. Dan
hi there isnt much in it 1 card or 2, the game has to support this 2 card feature and i think theres only 1 or 2 games that can? with 2 cards you need to turn the double cards on on a motherboard switch i think its called EZ plug? not sure they will then go 8x 1 card and 8x the other card in my mind not worth the money!
Cheers for your comments. I know the trick about the EZ board. Yes you are right it's expensive but I was sure that games don't need to specifically support SLI. It just means that you have twice the graphical processing power which any game can utilise. Just like the difference between a low-end and high-end card. I could be wrong but otherwise what is the point in buying 2 £400 cards if only a few games 'might' support it? Anyone else know if this is this case?
hi yes exactly mate! total waste of money! oh by the way i know all this as i am building a new pc with the exact same board as you! and i have read many site reviews and forums on this matter! also to note its the A8N sli deluxe... which has SATA300 or can use 300 but as it says it needs sata300 hds and i think there is only 1 true drive that will do this, and this isnt double either! so dont go that route aswell
I think you guys are barking up the wrong tree. This is a direct paste off of Nvidias website. SLI can be enabled for every gaming application, providing either performance scaling results through AFR or SFR rendering modes or increased visual quality through the SLI Antialiasing mode. In order to provide the optimal 'out-of-box' experience for its customers, NVIDIA has created an extensive set of optimized game profiles which enable SLI automatically. The full list of these SLI-optimized games can be found here. For applications not found in this list, simply follow these quick instructions to set up a new game profile to enable SLI. Information about Workstation application support can be found here. I realize the claim of up to 2x is a bit boastful because as most tests show, you lose some to overhead. Also scalability of the software will play a role and higer resolutions will notice the largest gains. This technology is expensive and may only be worth it for the true harcore. if you want a little more info on the technology check out: http://www.slizone.com/page/slizone_faq.html or go to http://www.tomshardware.com/index.html
hi thats the one so if expecting twice power its not there due to bottle necks... hence not worth the money at £400 which equates to £800 but for games that dont support sli you can turn on sli antialising for more improvement...
Personally I think SLI is an excellent idea! Imagine...You're a gamer..with a lot of money to burn, and u have the 6800, but 7800 comes out. You want it, but dont wanna dispose of the 6800 completely(still worth a lot of money), so what do u do? You utilize the two together. Correct me if I'm wrong
hi only identical will work plus it doesnt double the speed! useing 2 drops from x16 to share each having 8x plus he has 7800 its about 1 and a half when used with right things that is game / software
Eh, wat I am saying is that you dont have to completely throw out the old video card, and replace it with a new one. Thx for correcting me cuz I thought only identical would work but wasnt sure. Anyway lets create anothe hypothetical situation. Let's say u have a 6800, but ur friend gets a 7800. You dont want to get left in the dust, but dont want to spend all that money on the 7800. You can get another 6800 and have performance comparable to that of the 7800, no? Just my crazy theories... :]
Hmm, well a lot to ponder on. Looks like some games do boast that you can get twice the performance using 2 cards, although of course they don't say which one. Well I guess my 2 7800gtx's won't need to be replaced that soon...........unless of course an obscenely new faster card comes out. Seems to me that 'the next big thing' is always only slightly better. Although it seems to come out every 8-12 months. Thanks to all for your input.
2 7800s? WOW. Thats all I can say. That must be equivalent to an nVidia Geforce 15600, hehe. Nice setup!
Thanks skidme. Although I guess it is a blatant and fragrant waste of money, I've been without a decent PC for about 6 years (had one back in the day when Half Life was cutting edge!) so decided to go balls out and get the best that I could afford. I still may get the FX-57 chip or maybe an FX-55 as they should now bw dropping in price.......let's hope!
Well I've setup my Sli system with the 2 7800's and at the moment it sucks to be honest. Everygame thus far has had no improvement in framerate whatsoever. Nvidia harp on about "Sli antialiasing and it spreads the workload over 2 cards" yet very few games support it. Doom 3 and Half Life 2 still are jerky if I turn vsync on......I mean what kind of card will it take to get these games to run with vsync and 8xaa?? So what's the point in Sli......basically to get you to think that you'll have much better performance when the difference is so slight that it's really not worth £400 of anyone's money. I guess it doesn't use both cards for memory either? Jeez, what does it do apart from crash my PC alot? Doom 3 is actually slower and jerkier in places! Can you believe it!!!! Maybe it's my PSU? I've got a 500w Blue Storm.
