Ideapad y500: SLI or no?

Tristophis

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Aug 24, 2013
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I have a question about the Lenovo Ideapad y500 (http://shop.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/ideapad/y-series/y500/). There are two different models that I'm looking at: the first--which has Ultrabay SLI Graphics NVIDIA GeForce GT650M GDDR5 2GB--and the second, which has NVIDIA GeForce GT750M GDDR5 2GB. My question is this: Is it better to get the SLI version with the two lower cards, or the non-SLI with the one better card? Which would be better for games? The second model also has 16gb SSD and core i7, compared to no SSD and core i5 on the first.

So which one would be better for gaming, and possibly even some tinkering in Unity? Please be as down to earth with your answer as possible, as I'm not much of a hardware guy. And please don't link me to another thread, because I've read most of them and they don't answer my question head-on.
 
Solution
Definitely get the second one. The 750m will give you more performance, and you won't have to deal with SLI issues in games.

SubinP

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May 26, 2013
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Game compatibility, scaling, the added stuttering, more heat, possible driver problems. Throwing weak cards in SLI isn't really beneficial.
 


Apart from the weak card bit the rest of that is Xfire mate, SLi is so much better!
 

SubinP

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May 26, 2013
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I'm not arguing that Crossfire is better than SLI. I agree that SLI is superior in terms of usability. But using one card is much simpler than using two.
 


I disagree, I have been running SLi rigs since 2004 and have found them to be no more problematic than a single card rig.