Video Card Conundrum

I was reading through this months recommended video cards and saw a recommendation for two 260s in SLI. Went to newegg to search around and found this guy:

XFX GX260NADBF GeForce GTX 260 Black Edition Core 216 896MB 448-bit GDDR3 PCI Express 2.0 x16 HDCP Ready SLI Supported Video Card - Retail

$199 each after mail-in rebate. Two of these in SLI for less than my FX1700? Seems like a no-brainer.

Wheres that confounded Ape?

He must be over the hills and far away

I'm not familiar with Solidworks, their website lists only the Quadro cards as being compatible. If you are sure that a GTX 260 will work, don't hesitate to pick those up, they are great cards at a great price. If you ever plan to use Adobe CS4 though, hang on to the Quadro (only Photoshop will work with a GeForce, the rest of the apps require a Quadro for hardware acceleration).

Wifey has a Macbook Pro for her adobe pshop and illustrator. It would be nice to be able to use those on the new tower though... :-/

My coworker swears he can run solidworks with a 260 even though some of the "realview" graphics are disabled (this is advanced texturing that isn't 100% necessary, IMO.

What are the "sli problems"? I've been reading as much as possible about this stuff but no one mentions explicitly what those problems are... I'm guessing its just driver support for SLI? My mobo, psu, etc... all say "SLI ready" in some fashion...

It's really frusturating that I need to choose between being able to do freelance on the side, and having a computer that can handle newer video games.

In that scenario I could always disable SLI and use it as a single GTX260, right?

I'm not planning on maxing out Crysis at highest res or anything. 1920x1200 with moderate settings would be fine... although I do plan on playing games like HL2, FC2 and Crysis - Warhead.

Decided to put the Quadro to the Game test today... Installed Crysis: Warhead and spent a few minuted poking around the system setup.

I was having an issue where I couldn't use the mouse pointer correctly in the menu, regardless of what resolution I tried, when the game was full screen. Finally managed to get things working by turning all settings to minimum and trying my native resolution of 1920x1200.

The game has a lot of promise, but I was having a tough time playing due to the choppiness. I turned on the frame rate display and saw that I was only getting ~12-15 FPS in the first chapter of the game (not a lot going on). In the menu I only see 20 FPS, which is not a good indication for playability down the line. Also, with the rest of my computer being pretty damn good, it kinda sucks to have to dial everything to minimum and still not have a playable framerate because of the Quadro video card.

Now I'm going to try HL2, and see if I can get some better results. Either way, it looks like I'll be ordering the 2x GTX260 tonight.

^ Make sure you download the Ultra High mod for Crysis. It makes the game look wayyyy better

http://www.crymod.com/thread.php?t [...] c9c7bde755

http://www.crymod.com/thread.php?threadid=12717

and Cuban's Crysis UH mod

Good to hear!

I'm looking at the XFX Black Edition 260 (OC'd to 666MHz): http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6814150330

BSD: Thanks for the tip re: Ultra High mod. The sample images certainly look much more realistic, I can't wait to see it in-game.

Question: My Corsair 750TX has four PCI-E 6/8-pin connectors on a single cable. What is the best way to route this between the two cards?

1) First two connectors to slots A and B on the first card, third and fourth connectors to A and B on the second card?

2) First connector to card 1 slot A, second connector to card 2 slot A, third connector to card 1 slot b, fourth to card 2 slot B?

If there is no difference let me know, I'm a mech guy not EE.

First build w/ Quadro vs. Cleaned-up wiring w/ SLI 260s.



edit* oops, just noticed my EATX12V connector isn't plugged in... computer still booted up and ran fine though?

Side-by-side, Quadro & Geforce:



Ran Crysis:Warhead right after install and update to latest nvidia drivers. Bumped all settings up to enthusiast and set AA to 8x. The game is very fluid and looks great, although it gets very blurry when i turn quickly or am taking hits, I am guessing this is part of the game though?

I do notice that when the level starts it takes a few seconds for everything to be rendered. It will start with basic shapes and then everything kinda gets filled in. Every once and a while it will hang slightly, like the first time I tried switching weapons. Also, when I'm taking heavy fire the screen flashes black. Not so much a flicker, almost like the player is blinking or the frame drops out... really weird. I do have SLI enabled through the nvidia control panel... but I'm not sure what else to attribute the glitches too. Any ideas?

edit* When I quit playing Crysis and went back to desktop, my Asus PC Probe was showing CPU and mobo at ~62C. This seemed really high for the mobo (CPU not so much), and in fact had crossed the default alarm threshold. The 260s were running high 60's which seems okay, although I still want to tweak the fan speeds with n*tune, or whatever I was reading about yesterday. The bottom 260 is really close to the floor and I want to make sure its properly ventilated.

Anyways, when I get home I'm going to fix the EATX12V connector and pull the cards so I can get the serial numbers and register with XFX... perhaps they have their own drivers?

One frustration with the install was that I can no longer use the Q-Connectors that merge all the loose connectors from the front panel to the mobo. I had to leave the HD Audio connection to the front panel undone because the cable want long enough to snake around the cards!