Weird Question

Heres a weird question, if I get a SLI mobo rite, and in 1 slot I put a 7950gx2 and in the other a 7600gt.

Will it disable the SLI on the 7950gx2 and try to enable it with the 7600gt in teh nvidia control panel, if not what would it look like?

No i meant, would they be able to run seperatly say have 1screen plugged into a 7600gt while the main card 7950gx2 is still actually in SLI mod, being 2cards together, and having itself also connected to a different screen.

Sorry 4 the confusion.

i have absolutely no idea. My first thought would be no though.

Hard question eh

Would be a disapointment if I couldnt do something like that.. I kind wanted to use dual screens but I didnt want to cut the graphics powers down..

I am not completely sure what would happen, but I would think that mousemonkey has a good guess. If you do not physically connect the SLI cable to the graphics cards, and do not have SLI enabled, I would think you'd have a good chance at running 2 monitors (1 off each card)

Another question for you hatman is this - why don't you just plug both monitors into the 7950? It does have to outputs, doesn't it? I assume you are trying to keep the 7950 dedicated for gaming, right?

Give it a try though and contact nvidia like someone else mentioned. Good luck with it...I wondered about something similar w/ my 680i board, but am not yet to the dual monitor stage, yet.

Well, after I get new MOBO ill try to see if any mates have another nvidia card I can borrow to test it out, before I buy one myself.

also record a vid just incase everything goes nuts and you loose some hardware

I think you'll be fine, actually enabling SLI on the motherboard does a bunch of things with buses and stuff, bridging the two PCIE inputs. But since the 7950GX2 is only plugged into 1 slot it's not necessary to have SLI enabled on the motherboard to get both 7900 chips running together on the card, well unless you have two 7950GX2 cards running (one for each PCIE slot) then you'd have to enable SLI to take advantage of that.

But I'm probably starting to confuse people. You do not have to have SLI enabled to use one 7900GX2 card, all the combining of the graphics power is done on the card. So you should be able to plug in the 7600GT as well and have a 2nd monitor coming out of that one. All of this with SLI disabled, and still have the 7950GX2 running at full power.

This was confirmed by my nVidia mate, who reminded me that SLI has nothing to do with a single card (even if it is 1 card with two processors like the 7950GX2) and everything to do with getting the two PCIE slots to behave like 1.

Dahak, isn't this only for running in SLI or crossfire mode, so long as both cards are by the same manufacturer and not AMD/nVidia that require different drivers you should be able to run two different cards, just you cant SLI them.

You're goint to want a board that can runs x16 mode on the first slot and "something" on the second at the same time. Some boards make you run x8 on both slots...and I think the 7950GX2 uses eight pathways for each of its cards.

Ah but mousemonkey he's speaking of the GX2, which is two cards that are bolted together and use one slot as an interfece

Yeh, I think nearly everyone knows that you can run two cards on an SLI board independantly, including different models. You can even run different brands, but if I recall corectly the nVidia driver insists on being "primary"

Last time I ran an ATI and nVidia card together, the only bad thing I noticed was that one of the two wouldn't work as a secondary card and would try to force the primary position. Since 7x and 8x nVidia cards use different drivers, it's possible that both would fight for priority if you mixed them, but I haven't tested that as far as I can remember.

Oh, when one card insists on being primary, you'd better have it in the first slot if you want the "boot up" display to be the same as the primary Windows display.

Yes, SLI works with a third card on any 3-slot board, so SLI "in a slot" should work a third card on any motherboard that has the full 16 pathways on the primary slot and additional pathways on the second one.

The two-in-one 7950GX2 uses SLI across two cards on one slot. That's why using two 7950GX2's required "Quad SLI" to be developed.

hehe, SLI stick sounds like an expensive thing to stir your coffee with

But i'm pretty sure the intended use was to use it to game at abnormally high frame rates.

I don't want to confuse people but PCI-X is NOT the same than PCI-E.

And I think it is possible to run normal SLI and have a third graphics card in non-SLI mode working too. So why wouldn't the 7950GX2 and the 7600GT work together?

That really sux, cant you RMA it?

I had a 6600GT back in the day that did exactly the same to me, they had no problem swapping it out.

and on the dark side of humor, now you really do have an expensive SLI stick coffee stirrer