7800 SLI cards... why two?

[Bry_Guy]

N00b here, struggling with putting together a new rig. The newest Nvidia 7800 series cards are always recommended in pairs... I'm wondering how that works? Are these users always driving dual screens, or is there some sort of load balancing going on that improves the performance on a single screen?

Crap, I feel old.

 

[cleeve]

SLI is all about load balancing.

Alternate-frame rendering, and other methods are used to increase frames-per-second performance on a single screen, like the old Voodoos used to do if you hooked a couple up in tandem.

It's a great system if you have wads of extra cash, but not really all that fantastic if you're limited. A single high-end card is pretty much always better than two low-end cards in SLI mode. So it's a toy for the rich, or those who have upgrade plans in the future.

As a point of interest, Ati's overdue version, called "Crossfire", should be released within the next couple months.

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<b>Geforce <font color=red>6800 Ultra</b></font color=red>
<b>AthlonXP <font color=red>~3300+</b></font color=red> <i>(Barton 2500+ o/c 412 FSB @ 2266 Mhz)</i>
<b>3dMark05: <font color=red>5,275</b>

 

[Bry_Guy]

Gotcha, thanks bro.

 

[pauldh]

...are always recommended in pairs

It's called marketing. They'ed love it if you bought 2. Anyway, around here we rarely recommend SLI as usually a single higher end card is better. In the case of the 7800 series, one is enough unless you hope to set benchmark records or game at resolutions above 1600x1200.


<A HREF="http://service.futuremark.com/compare?3dm05=658042" target="_new">3DMark05</A> <A HREF="http://service.futuremark.com/compare?2k3=3781954" target="_new">3DMark03</A>