Archived from groups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.action (
More info?)
On Fri, 22 Jul 2005 01:38:17 -0400, "Magnulus"
<magnulus@bellsouth.net> wrote:
> I see NVidia is now pushing SLI even for the regular 6600 graphics cards,
>the ones with only 500 MHz DDR, 9 gigabytes bandwith. What are they
>thinking? Are 2 GeForce 6600 LE cards really going to deliver the
>performance of even one GeForce 6600 GT card (which has about 16 GB/s
>bandwith)?
>
Probably not. I did SLI back in the days of the Voodoo2, and back then
the prices were on par with today's prices. You had to have a 2D card
($150 or so), and two Voodoo2 cards (about $500 for the tops of the
line). Thus, I spent about $650 on bleeding edge video. Was the system
fast? Yes. Was it worth it? In hindsight, no.
If you have the money to burn it is DEFINITELY worth it. But for must
of us, we don't have the money to burn. The simple fact is that video
card companies come out with better graphics cards almost yearly, and
that what is leading edge now will be outdated in two years.
Similarly, a modern system will not have just one bottleneck as time
passes, it will have several. Spending a large sum of money on the
video subsystem will not help much when your games start getting
CPU-throttled, memory throttled, etc.
Sure, you can spend $800 now on video and get framerate that are 50%
higher than everyone else. But in a year, when game technology starts
stressing other components of your system, the benefit of that video
subsystem decreases quite a bit. And this assume you have a leading
edge system right now; if you don't already have a CPU releases in the
last few months, with 1GB of RAM, fast drives, etc., then consider
spending your money elsewhere.
People tend to ignore one of the biggest elements of system slowness,
and that is your drive subsystem. A fast drive subsystem causes levels
to load quickly, and gives you much more pleasurable computer
experience. RAID 0 with 3+ drives is great, but costs a lot of money
and has no redundancy. I like RAID 1 with 2 fast drives; reads are
wicked fast, writes are about the same as a single drive, the cost is
not outrageous, and you get redundancy. RAID 0/1/5/10 are affordable
with ATA/SATA/SATA2.
Your best bet is to buy the best single card you can afford and use
the money you save on a second card to upgrade other parts of your
system, or save the money if you don't have it to burn.
Please replace the "NoSpam" with "MCI" in my email address in order to
reply.
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Joe Granto Joe.Granto@NoSpam.Com
Senior Engineer Intel Engineering,MCI