SLI and the 680i

[zompton]

I have a couple of questions about SLI. I havnt been in the hardware game for a bit so im unsure about how useful SLI is. Back when it was released i remember alot of video games did not support SLI, and almost none gave a FPS increase when using it. How useful is SLI in videwo games these days? Does a game have to support SLI for it to get any use out of the second card?

I have been reading about the 680i over the 650i boards and it seems a 680i runs sli 16x 16x and a 650i runs 16x 8x. Do 680i boards increase SLI by a large amount at all do to this?

 

[Maziar]

well , if u play games @ 1900x1200 resolutions or higher , then SLI will help you, in lower resolutions , it doenst help that much , and its not necessary , check out tomshardware charts , they may help you ,

680i runs sli @ dual 16x
650 runs sli @ 16x and 8x ,

the only exception is : P5N32SLI-E , which is 650 but runs @ dual 16x

http://anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.aspx?i=2894

 

[warezme]

I have a couple of questions about SLI. I havnt been in the hardware game for a bit so im unsure about how useful SLI is. Back when it was released i remember alot of video games did not support SLI, and almost none gave a FPS increase when using it. How useful is SLI in videwo games these days? Does a game have to support SLI for it to get any use out of the second card?

I have been reading about the 680i over the 650i boards and it seems a 680i runs sli 16x 16x and a 650i runs 16x 8x. Do 680i boards increase SLI by a large amount at all do to this?

I wouldn't worry to much about game support. My experience has been that generally (95%) of the time if the game is DirectX, than it supports SLI. Even if not officially supported, you can go to the game profiles in the Nvidia control panel and add the exe for the game and assign SLI to it. It works after that. I play or have played Oblivion, Fear, FearXP, Stalker, Prey, HL2 any episode, Dirt and SLI has always been there working great. I have personally have yet to run a game that didn't like SLI. COD2 was a bit cranky but once set it ran SLI also and that was not necessarily a game issue. As a matter of fact, older games like Doom3 etc actually run better with SLI or at least get more performance out of it.

I have the 680i SLI board and my advice would be if you get to high bandwidth expensive GFx's like I got, make sure you do get the dual 16X PCIE slots or you will cheat yourself out of performance because both cards will default to the lowest common denominator being 8X and your limiting your upgrade potential.

I hear people knocking SLI as not gaining you much but generally thats people that don't even have SLI and even if the bottom line difference in a game was the difference between going from 25FPS to 35FPS, thats the difference between the game being jerky unplayable to smooth playable. Your gains will generally be much higher than that, thats just a minimal example.

 

[DarkTide]

Just check the VGA charts on Toms.

You'll see the biggest difference in running at high res. If you have a high end monitor it's certainly worth looking in to.