To SLI or not

I currently have an FX55 and 2 6800GTs SLI'd, and from my experiences I don't think all the charts on Tom's are correct. When I brought this up in prevous posts some folks mentioned that new drivers or patches maybe were done since those tests were done.

But I mainly run all my games (WoW and CS:S) in 16x12 with the details shown in the vga charts and I get a lot higher fps. And if you look at Oblivian, and 3dmark 2006 you will see there is a difference in one card and 2. Those games/charts may give you a better feel about wether an sli setup will be better then some other new card.

But becuase I bought my machine used, I don't know what it was like running with 1 card then upgrading to 2, sorry.

With two cards you can expect to see an increase in frame rate regardless of resolution or screen size. (I use a 19" LCD)

It's like saying X6800 will give better framerates than a 4400+. It will give couple more, but not worth it.

I would try going for a 8800 instead of SLIing 7800GTXs.

I agree. I'd get one really good card than SLI'ing the 7800GTX. You could get better framerates with a single 7900GTX, and twice that much with a 8800GTX.

The problem with SLI is OVERHEAD. You're going to end up using a lot more of your computer's resources to run the extra card, and having a low resolution display will cause you to actually lose FPS sometimes. For SLI (this applies more to the 7950GX2 and 8800 series cards), get the bigger display and/or crank up the quality and resolution. That's where you'll notice the difference. If you do end up getting another 7800GTX, then you should be fine. It's older technology and requires less resources to run the second card than newer ones, so the overhead isn't that big of a deal and you're gaining more performance than you're losing. But yeah, try for a really nice single-card, get the bennefits of the newer technology and speed, and SLI that sucka' later would be my goal.