1 Monitor SLI Question

[Kramer0526]

Hey all..just finished up another build and after a few head-scratching moments it's running fairly well.

Down to business..I have 1 GTX 470 which will run games decently with high settings (I'm talking COD easy, Just Cause 2 slightly harder, and of course, Metro 2033 being the hardest to play), but I want to squeeze out some higher frames. I can overclock this already hot card, but my friend brought up another option...SLI.

Normally, I thought that SLI was for multiple monitors, and that if you were only using one monitor it was always best to simply upgrade graphics cards rather than add more. He seems to think differently, saying that the GTX 400 series "scale really good". Can anyone elaborate, and maybe shed some light?

This right now poses me with 2 options..either add another 470 to the system or just wait for the next generation since I don't think an upgrade to a 480 will make a humungous difference. Though..if there doesn't appear to be another major generation coming out soon (normally I wouldn't imagine a time when that would be, but NVIDIA has proven me wrong with the 6 month wait for the fermi series) my old man is building a computer that can take my 470, leaving an open slot for a 480 (480 is already pushing the budget..otherwise I'd be talking about a 5970 here )

Also..I'm fairly sure my GPU is the bottleneck here. I have an i7 930 and 6Gb DDR3 running at 175Mhz BCLK (sorry..I forget what exactly the clocks for the CPU and RAM correspond for that).

Thanks guys

Kramer

 

[virrze]

x-x you'll have to check out if your power supply can handle SLI 470s, cause those can run preeeettyyy hot. IMO for the price of 2 470s you can get a 5970, which runs a little bit less hot, and then you can xfire incase you need to upgrade, with the 470, you will have to buy a whole new card. (3x SLI doesn't scale that great, only 20% performance increase.) Also keep in mind that ATI cards run cooler then most nVidia cards.

 

[Mousemonkey]

Hey all..just finished up another build and after a few head-scratching moments it's running fairly well.

Down to business..I have 1 GTX 470 which will run games decently with high settings (I'm talking COD easy, Just Cause 2 slightly harder, and of course, Metro 2033 being the hardest to play), but I want to squeeze out some higher frames. I can overclock this already hot card, but my friend brought up another option...SLI.

Normally, I thought that SLI was for multiple monitors, and that if you were only using one monitor it was always best to simply upgrade graphics cards rather than add more. He seems to think differently, saying that the GTX 400 series "scale really good". Can anyone elaborate, and maybe shed some light?

This right now poses me with 2 options..either add another 470 to the system or just wait for the next generation since I don't think an upgrade to a 480 will make a humungous difference. Though..if there doesn't appear to be another major generation coming out soon (normally I wouldn't imagine a time when that would be, but NVIDIA has proven me wrong with the 6 month wait for the fermi series) my old man is building a computer that can take my 470, leaving an open slot for a 480 (480 is already pushing the budget..otherwise I'd be talking about a 5970 here )

Also..I'm fairly sure my GPU is the bottleneck here. I have an i7 930 and 6Gb DDR3 running at 175Mhz BCLK (sorry..I forget what exactly the clocks for the CPU and RAM correspond for that).

Thanks guys

Kramer

What resolution are you using/intending to use? That's the important thing, at 16 x 10 and above is when dual cards come into their own IMHO. And as I only use one monitor I can safely say that dual cards are useful and it's only recently that more than one monitor has been able to be used with SLi, this time last year SLi mode resulted in only one output being active with two monitors only running in 2D mode. I think you get your 2d mode on one and your SLi app on the other now but I haven't tried it.

 

[nforce4max]

You can use multiple monitors in SLI in 2D and well in 3D, a friend of mine has two GTX295 and a 9800gt in one rig and has 5 monitors hooked up to it.

 

[Kramer0526]

My resolution is going to be 1920x1080 for 99.9% of the time. If I could just spend another 350 on a 2nd 470, and have a setup that would smoke a 480 or even a 5970 that would be great, but I don't know how well that would get away with the whole heat/power issue.

My power supply is a Corsair HX850

I might just end up waiting to buy the next generation since I just built this $2.5K computer lol...why does this stuff have to be so expensive!?!