To SLI or NOT to SLI

Hey guys, it's ME Half-dude!

...don't you just miss that intro? Come on you know you do. : 3

Yeah, I'm here..where have I been? Anywhere but map making.. I guess it just wasn't my thing huh? I know I only come here when I have a PC question, but I can't think of a more knowledgeable and 'get to the point' community to ask.

So anyway, I've started thinking of upgrading, I mean next year is gonna be a big year, Portal 2.. maybe Episode 3 sometime.. HOPEFULLY Duke Nukem Forever.. so why not you know? Well when building my PC about 4 years ago I had enough forethought to make sure and get an SLI mobo.. initially I had a 9800GTX GPU in there however it mysteriously got burnt out, I think I even talked to you guys when that happened. For the last year I've been using a BFG Geforce 260GTX overclocked which seems pretty much equal in power to my old 9800 even maybe a little more.

Anyway, the time has come and I'm trying to decide if I should make use of my SLI motherboard investment and buy a second 260GTX OC, or forget it and get like a 470 or 480 for like 500 dollars. My two main concerns are heat and power consumption.. of course. Currently my single 260GTX runs at about 60C on idle.. probably around 68 when on load... I'm not sure how much hotter it'd be with 2 of them right next to each other. I have a nice full tower with good airflow so it should be fine I guess.. however the hot summers here in Kansas always bother me. As for PSU I've got a Thermaltake 750Watt PSU with 28A on the 5+ and 19A on the 12+ bar.. you think that'd be sufficient?

But anyway, I guess my main question is for those who use SLI. Is SLI really worth it? Is it stable and does it really make have that much of a performance boost? Or is it more of a gimmick? I've personally never used it before so I don't know. Also back to my first question, do you think 2 Geforce 260GTX GPUs in SLI would last me much longer with the new generation games coming out? Or would it be a better investment to just get a brand new card?

Anyway, thanks a lot guys, I know it feels like I just come to you guys when I want help, and I know some of you guys might still have hard feelings towards me from back in the day. But I really do appreciate the opinions you guys give me.

PC Specs for those who need them:

OS: Windows XP Home 32 bit (plan on upgrading to Win7 soon)
RAM: 4GB DDR2
CPU: Athlon X2 3.2Ghz
MOBO: Gigabyte M750SLI-DS4
GPU: BFG Geforce 260GTX OC

But anyway, I guess my main question is for those who use SLI. Is SLI really worth it? Is it stable and does it really make have that much of a performance boost? Or is it more of a gimmick? I've personally never used it before so I don't know. Also back to my first question, do you think 2 Geforce 260GTX GPUs in SLI would last me much longer with the new generation games coming out? Or would it be a better investment to just get a brand new card?

From my experience: SLI offers barely any performance gain for paying for a brand-new card. SLI really is for multi-display set-up.

So say if you spend ~250$ on 2nd a new card, you would see a larger performance boost if you put that toward a SSD (games will load faster, rendering will be faster).

I notice BFG is your card GPU manufacturer. BFG is getting out of the graphics card business. So finding an exact model to match is critical.

Also your still on XP. I don' think DirectX9 is going to see a performance boost if you throw another card in there. DirectX10 though (on Windows 7), you would.

But thats just me. SLI I think is good if you want to do multiple motors (2+), but performance you should look at the slowest area of your computer: the hard drive (aka: get a Raptor or SSD)

Hey its Half-Dude!

From what I understand SLI hasn't been worth it since Voodoo2s were all the rage.

SLI hasn't required a duplicated card since GF7. If you've got a GTX260 you can slap in a 9800 with no issues.

The benefit, however, isn't really a graphical one. Using it to improve graphics is, pretty much a waste of time, currently. HOWEVER, if you want to use 3D Vision or, PhysX, it's worth it. You could, for instance, use a 260 as primary renderer and the 9800 as a dedicated physics card, if you wanted (or Cuda for games that support it, like Just Cause 2)

It is worth taking a look at. But, it's not really going to help in the graphics department unless you scale things WAY up.

Also, to note, now you can do multi-card SLI, so it's not just 2 cards, any modern board will support at least 3, and two will be going 16x, minimum. More expensive boards MAY have four 16x simultaneous slots.

Yak, that's because one was a frame buffer (VGA card) and the other was a processor (no way of actually outputting video) It was actually very uncommon to have a high end processor unit at the time that could also output directly to the monitor. SLI, of course, is not the same thing.

To answer your other question: NO, the 400 series is already on par with SLIng 2 200 series cards, graphics performance wise. Like I said, unless you're going something insane, like putting in four GTX485s or something ... it's not worth it for graphical improvements. PhysX, 3D Vision, and Cuda support are what it's good for.

Current Solid State Drives are a terrible investment. Microsoft doesn't treat the drive different from a disc based drive ... this crushes any performance boost you may have once had ... AND they get slower over time. And it's not the drives fault. They simply treat it like any other hard drive ... and flash memory, simply, doesn't work that well under that guise. BUT, since MS is the largest used platform, and they ONLY support that method, manufacturers won't release versions that don't have this limitation through the interface (SATA connection) ... so NOBODY at consumer level gets the benefits of SSD currently. I do not recommend SSD as a result.

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Blame it on Microsoft, God does.

Crono said:
SLI hasn't required a duplicated card since GF7. If you've got a GTX260 you can slap in a 9800 with no issues.

The benefit, however, isn't really a graphical one. Using it to improve graphics is, pretty much a waste of time, currently. HOWEVER, if you want to use 3D Vision or, PhysX, it's worth it. You could, for instance, use a 260 as primary renderer and the 9800 as a dedicated physics card, if you wanted.

It is worth taking a look at. But, it's not really going to help in the graphics department unless you scale things WAY up.

To answer your other question: NO, the 400 series is already on par with SLIng 2 200 series cards, graphics performance wise. Like I said, unless you're going something insane, like putting in four GTX485s or something ... it's not worth it for graphical improvements. PhysX, 3D Vision, and Cuda support are what it's good for.

That's odd in that case, since Nvidia's website and documentation that comes with the graphics cards still say you NEED to have the same model cards for SLI to work.

I'm confused by what you mean saying "improving graphics." Do you mean improving visual quality like texture quality, higher AA, higher resolution, ect, ect or improving FPS with the graphics settings you currently have?

I believe you guys in what you say, but I'm confused, how can SLI be so ineffective? By how they explain it, it sounds like the graphics cards share the workload rendering 50% of the screen each.. wouldn't having each one working approximately half as hard as they'd usually work leave close to half of the remaining processing power of the card available for more workload? I mean if it works like that it sounds like SLI should give you double the speed of one card like the ads claim.

Lastly Chrono, you said "the 400 series is already on par with SLIng 2 200 series cards." That means you're saying if I SLI'd two 260 series cards it'd be 'on par' with a mid-range 400 series card right? That SOUNDS like what I want doesn't it? I mean if a Geforce 470 costs around $400, and a second Geforce 260 for around $130 (that's how much they were where I bought the one I have now.. they had a lot of them laying around) and save money gettinthe same performance boost.. right?...

half-dude said:
That's odd in that case, since Nvidia's website and documentation that comes with the graphics cards still say you NEED to have the same model cards for SLI to work.

Ah, sorry, it has to be the same processor architecture. So, GT, GTX, etc. But, generation is not a factor. AND this is only if you want them to share processing load. If you want some card to do dedicated processing separately, this doesn't matter, it just needs to be GF8 or above.

half-dude said:
I'm confused by what you mean saying "improving graphics." Do you mean improving visual quality like texture quality, higher AA, higher resolution, ect, ect or improving FPS with the graphics settings you currently have?

Yes. If you want them to co-process the rendering of the graphics scene is what I mean by "improving graphics". PhysX and Cuda are part of the GPGPU trend, or general process graphics processing unit. This means, they're not part of the render pipeline, they can go off and do their own thing while things are being rendered. It offloads from the GPU and CPU.

half-dude said:
I believe you guys in what you say, but I'm confused, how can SLI be so ineffective? By how they explain it, it sounds like the graphics cards share the workload rendering 50% of the screen each.. wouldn't having each one working approximately half as hard as they'd usually work leave close to half of the remaining processing power of the card available for more workload? I mean if it works like that it sounds like SLI should give you double the speed of one card like the ads claim.

Well, you need to understand, theoretical possibility and real-world reality are two different things. What they're claiming are theoretical maximums. However, most math behind these kinds of things are idealistic ... the real-world is imperfect, numbers aren't round. So, it's unlikely, even in the best conditions that the cards will reach maximum speed in SLI ... and on top of that ... it depends on the game. If the developers do not optimize for SLI in any way you might not even see any improvements! There is also some overhead because they're two physically separate chips on two physically separate boards. Electrons do take some time to travel. And interconnects slow them down greatly. (Electricity is only conceptually instantaneous ... but that latency does add up to noticeable levels in reality)

half-dude said:
Lastly Chrono, you said "the 400 series is already on par with SLIng 2 200 series cards." That means you're saying if I SLI'd two 260 series cards it'd be 'on par' with a mid-range 400 series card right? That SOUNDS like what I want doesn't it? I mean if a Geforce 470 costs around $400, and a second Geforce 260 for around $130 (that's how much they were where I bought the one I have now.. they had a lot of them laying around) and save money gettinthe same performance boost.. right?...

Seriously, ... after all these years, there is no H in my name.

No. That is not what I was saying. You see, when you SLI the largest improvement you'll get in reality, is about 80% And that's best case scenario, you generally get an improvement in the range of 10%-65%, which is, on average about 1.5X better.

Now, the GTX285 on its own, will only be slightly outperformed by 2 SLI 260s. and the 470, for example, can mop the floor with the 280. By mop, I mean get almost double framerate in Crysis Warhead at 1680x1050. And I'm assuming the 260 has 216 cores, not the stock 192:64:28

Now, I hear the 470, actually, isn't the best bang for your buck. The 460 is comparable in performance (generally about 10FPS less in games at the same settings with the same hardware) AND it's a sub-$250 card. It generally goes for around $180-$260 ... the GTX260 is $200. So, the 460 is actually even cheaper than trying to SLI your current rig ... ALSO You can still SLI both the cards together. Even if one is just dedicated to something else.

All reviews I've heard of the 460 are favorable. It can perform well for any game out at 1680x1050. Unless you're gaming at super high resolutions it's a really good choice if you're sticking with nVidia.

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Blame it on Microsoft, God does.

Crono said:
Seriously, ... after all these years, there is no H in my name.

No. That is not what I was saying. You see, when you SLI the largest improvement you'll get in reality, is about 80% And that's best case scenario, you generally get an improvement in the range of 10%-65%, which is, on average about 1.5X better.

Now, the GTX285 on its own, will only be slightly outperformed by 2 SLI 260s. and the 470, for example, can mop the floor with the 280. By mop, I mean get almost double framerate in Crysis Warhead at 1680x1050. And I'm assuming the 260 has 216 cores, not the stock 192:64:28

Now, I hear the 470, actually, isn't the best bang for your buck. The 460 is comparable in performance (generally about 10FPS less in games at the same settings with the same hardware) AND it's a sub-$250 card. It generally goes for around $180-$260 ... the GTX260 is $200. So, the 460 is actually even cheaper than trying to SLI your current rig ... ALSO You can still SLI both the cards together. Even if one is just dedicated to something else.

All reviews I've heard of the 460 are favorable. It can perform well for any game out at 1680x1050. Unless you're gaming at super high resolutions it's a really good choice if you're sticking with nVidia.

Wow I've really been spelling it wrong all these years? XD Heh Heh.. sorry bout that.

Well that really put it into perspective, thank you. May I ask where you go for reviews and FPS graphs and the like? I may want to use it for future buying.. I've just been looking around on newegg.. I'll take a look at that 460 fo sho!

Google searches You wanna search for something like "Manufacturer (i.e. EVGA) Chipset/model (i.e. GTX 460) Benchmark"

The most annoying part is people in hardware forums make thread titles like "GTX 460 vs SLI GTX 260" ... and it's all talk with no benchmarks or specs of any kind. Like "Should I get it" "it's not worth it" "nvidia sucks!" that sort of nonsense. Nothing really helpful ... You have to do some deep searching sometimes.

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Blame it on Microsoft, God does.

Funny enough, I wasn't even aware that the "GTX" "GTS" "GT" designated the architecture in the card.. that will be helpful to know in the future. So I guess, let me see if I understand correctly, as long as two GPUs are in the same designation like both GTXs, they'll be not much different in performance? Maybe I'm completely wrong with all that...

That's what nVidia's site says. It's important to know that chipset architecture is not the same as GPU architecture.

Technically speaking, a GF 400 series card has a different chipset architecture than a GF 200 series card ... even if their GPUs are both GTX architecture.

But I do know that you can make an unrelated card dedicated ... even if nVidia is saying otherwise ... people do it all the time.

Architecture doesn't say anything about the chips speed or abilities ... it just describes a common ground rubric on how it works. That's it. Performance is still up in the air.

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Blame it on Microsoft, God does.

Yak_Fighter said:
Hey its Half-Dude!

Oddly enough, I was thinking the same exact thing when I saw the postee..

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The best things in life, aren't things.