Well,

I have two unopened 9800 gtx's, and I'm debating right now whether to stick with them or trade them towards a GTX 260 or a 4870. I bought them before I visited the nvidia sli forums and other sli forums, and I must say the things I've read made me super scared of my sli setup not working with games like Age of Conan, Crysis, and The Witcher... which would mean wasted money.

So, if some of you have positive SLI/CF stories that will assuage my fears, PLEASE SHARE THEM! (I've already had more than my share of negative stories) Otherwise, I'll be returning these 2 cards Monday and grabbing either a gtx 260 or a 4870 when they come out.

Thanks.

only positive? hmmmmmmmmmm sorry

two 9800GTX s will perform better than those cards, most of the time, but there are still some quirky games that just dont take advantage of the two cards. That said, the single cards wont suffer from that problem. If you go SLI, what resolution will you be going with?

I'll be playing at 1900 x 1200. That said, I read that Age of Conan currently performs the same with either 1 or 2 cards (I didn't find anyone that claimed it took advantage of SLI), and for some people Crysis performed worse in SLI while for others it performed better.

Anyways... I am still waiting for some good stories!!!

Crysis scales with SLI at resolutions higher then 1024x768.

9800GTX SLI vs 9800gtx crysis

pcgamer,

Thanks, but I've seen many similar graphs before. My point is, a LOT of people are having trouble getting SLI to work in Crysis and other games. I know in all review sites it shows scaling well, and that's one of the reasons I bought them, but end-user experience seems to be a bit different for some reason.

for the most part, whether cf/sli works is solely down to the driver team of the company, it is not a problem as such with cf/sli. I would think reviewers might use the renaming of the exe trick to get sli working.

Well, I had great luck with SLI, but that was 2 years ago. I nearly got 2x the performance of one card. Still, though, it was hit or miss. Most of the new games are SLIable because it is fairly popular. I can't say for which current games, though, as my SLI setup is long gone.

have had one crossfire setup " 2 years ago " being 2 x1800gto's no dongle or bridge needed.


saw a great increase in FPS in HL2, FEAR & BF2.


will be CF my next setup when the 4870's come out.

I have a 24" screen @ 1920x1200 and I had 2 8800GT's in SLI and the performance was inconsistent at best. I was fairly disappointed with the overall performance increase but I think it might have been at least partly due to my P5N32-E SLI motherboard and or my E6300. I had nothing but issues with the motherboard and I had the CPU up to 2.8 for a while and one day it just wouldn't boot at anything over stock. I have a feeling that the CPU at 1.86 just couldn't feed the cards fast enough.

I bought a Rampage Formula and a E8400 and when the 4870 is released I'm going to give Crossfire a shot (maybe quad Crossfire with the X2 instead). All in all I would say the performance increase is ok but not really worth the price premium (twice the price for sometimes almost 70% more performance).

Nvidia chipsets are crap and in my opinion you are much better off with a more stable, higher performing Intel chipset with a good CPU and 1 of any card or 2 ATI cards. Doing that will give you a much more consistently performing system.

I have (as you can see from my signature) Two Axle 512MB 8600 GT in SLI on a nForce4 board.
I game on my 19" CRT Monitor at 1024 x 768 @ 85 hz or 1280 x 1024 @ 75 hz on high settings.

And my 8600's run just marvelously.

Honestly the card you get depends on how you game and because I have a 19" screen and I don't play with AA & AF on my cards are just right for me. But I know that the 8600's can't really handle anything past 1280 x 1024. It is true that for most games Alternate Frame Render 1 will give you the best frame rates (except for COD4 & Warrock where I have Split Frame Render).

So I hope that my story helped shed some light for you when it comes to the potential of SLI.

I find SLI is great if you don't overtax the video cards (ie: Crysis Very High settings)

But if you overtax the video card the microstuttering+lag makes it just pure annoyance.

Any games which don't support SLI usually aren't graphically intense enough to overcome 1 video card - its just nice to have the extra card there for those which do; which is quite literally nearly all modern games.

I run SLI on dual 16x pci-e 2.0 lanes and I get the feeling that if I was using a motherboard with a lesser bandwidth equation I might feel differently about its performance - many people with a lower tech pci-e 2.0 solution are generally more happy with single big video cards like the 9800gx2, 8800 GTX, ati hd 3870x2

My 8800 GT SLI setup handles all modern directx 9 games well, and it will give a nice performance boost in 1st gen directx 10 games - but to play high end dx10 games like crysis you generally are talking in the realm of higher end video arrays than this.

Thanks ovaltinplease and takealready. After reading a lot on this subject, I'm going to give these cards a go on SLI. Then, depending on performance, I might revert back to single GPU with the succesor to the gtx 280 (whenever that comes), or I'll stick with SLI.