Question about setting up SLI

[Eru]

Are there many requirements for SLI other than the neumerical sufix being the same (ie GTX570)? I'm looking at setting up SLI EVGA GTX570's but there are neumerous variations on the EVGA site. I have just the basic card (1.2GB of RAM and a 732MHz GPU). Would SLI still work if I picked up the classified card or would need an identical card all together?

 

[KING_OF_SAND]

yup, but the video ram size has to be the same. I don't know if the same applies with Nvidia but i know with AMD you can have 2 cards with different clocks.

 

[Eru]

So just so long as the RAM is identical the GPU clocks can be different? The classified has about 100MHz greater of a clock but the same memory.

Here's the links for the two:

http://www.evga.com/products/moreInfo.asp?pn=012-P3-1570-AR&family=GeForce 500 Series Family&sw=

http://www.evga.com/products/moreInfo.asp?pn=012-P3-1578-AR&family=GeForce 500 Series Family&sw=

 

[KING_OF_SAND]

Same amount of memory. Yea those will work together. It's also not difficult to match the non classified to the other one.

 

[Lollipop]

Why even bother? Why not just pick the normal one?

 

[Eru]

Because it's almost 100MHz for $10.

 

[S_I_N]

my suggestion is get the same as ya have now as in sli both cards will run at the lowest one. so why buy bigger better (unless you plan on changing it later) and have it down clocked

 

[Eru]

I didn't know the other would be down clocked. I might pitch in the extra $10 and see if I get a second for christmas XD

I'll give it some more thought either way.

 

[J0s3e]

Get the identical one. There is no point getting 100MHz faster card, selling the slower one later on to get another one... Too complicated. By the time your 570's will not be powerful enough, there will be a new generation of Nvidia cards anyway.

 

[Scoob]

Hi,

Due to buying my first GTX 570 (a Palit) at launch and the 2nd one (an Inno3D Card) second hand here, my cards, while both running the same core speed, are different revisions. This means the newer card is shorter, different layout different cooler etc. yet both play very nicely together.

IF you were to get a pair of cards that were clocked differently then it should revert to the speed of the slower card. Still, using Afterburner it's easy to set clocks etc. on each card. Once installed, and you enable SLI in the drivers, it will apply an SLI profile to every game you have installed - well it did for me. Everything so far has worked well - the one exception being the rather buggy RAGE which is an OpenGL rather than DirectX game and, while you can force it, actually plays SLOWER (MUCH) with SLI enabled. A viable option here is to let card 1 handle the rendering and let card 2 handle the AA...works very well and both cards are equally loaded during gameplay.

One thing to be aware of...the SLI bridge connector is usually supplied with SLI capable motherboards, you DON'T usually get them with the cards...

Best of luck.

Scoob.

 

[JezEngland]

It's OK. I have different factory clocks with my 480's and they've been fine running at different clocks in SLI. Most of the time I have them set at equal speeds with MSI Afterburner. I guess the motherboard quality is a big player in this, to regulate the data flow, or the CPU has PCI bus's built in maby.