SLI Question

[Chaosoldier]

Thank you for taking the time to help!

I currently have a MSI N580GTX GTX 580 (Fermi) 3GB 384-bit that I bought about half a year ago, well I'm ready to upgrade by buying a second of the card and the model has been discontinued.
MSI 580 gtx
Core Clock 832
Shader Clock 1747
Memory Clock 4200
386-bit
3g vram

EVGA 580 gtx
Core Clock 772
Shader Clock 1544
Memory Clock 4008
386-bit
1.5g vram

I understand that SLI cards will attempt to run at the same speeds,Will the MSI card still utilize the full 3g of VRAM or cap out at 1.5g to match the EVGA card?

I have never SLI'd two cards with different proccessing speeds before so anything you feel I should really know would be useful advice.
Thank you again for your time

 

[cuecuemore]

Cards don't attempt to run at the same speeds unless something has changed in the month since I was running SLI. You can easily clock the together using Afterburner or a similar utility, the big issue is the incongruity in the VRAM sizes. I've seen people tweak their registry such that the cards will work together with different VRAMs, but one card will always cap the other.

 

[Chaosoldier]

Best answer selected by Chaosoldier.

 

[aviral]

Do not SLI these cards because they will create many problems because the difference between these cards is quite huge so it will not be adding any SLI advantage.

My recommendation is buy two new graphic cards of same type and sell the old one or buy just a single card GTX 680 which will give you more power from only one card and down the line you can add another one if you really require power.