SLI? - To be or not to be

[AdamThomspon]

I'm planning on building a gaming pc but I am undecided on the graphics card. I've seen 512mb SLI Nvidia Cards for around £50 a pop and the newer 716mb (or close to that) Nvidia Cards are much more expensive. My question is is it worth getting two decent cards in SLI or would one of the top notch expensive ones be better?

I'm planning on making my system with Intel Core 2 Quad and a motherboard that supports SLI. Thanks in advance for any suggestions you can make.

Adam

 

[nrage]

Toms has SLI and non-SLI frame rates for 8800's (no 8600's annoyingly) but you can draw some conclusions, for example:

Oblivion: The Elder Scrolls 4 (Outdoor)

Fraps/THG-Savegame (v1.1) (1920x1200x32, no AA, 8x AF, max Quality, HDR-R)

20.90 fps - 8800 GTS 320mb

38.80 fps - 8800 GTS 320mb SLI

= 17.90 fps (86%*) increase

28.70 fps - 8800 GTX 768mb

53.80 fps - 8800 GTX 768mb SLI

= 25.10 fps (87%*) increase

Conclusion: SLI will give you an 86% increase with these cards, playing oblivion on the hardware they tested with, at those settings.

If you can get some figures for the 8600's then you can compare 8600 SLI vs 8800 single and do cost/benefit analysis eg. number of frames per £ or $ spent etc.

* Percentages are calculated like so; If card #1 gives X frames, card #2 gives Y frames, percentage = Y/X*100. In other words card #2 is working at this %age.

All games and cards being equal you could then take any fps value for a card/game and multiply by 1 + %age/100 to get the possible SLI fps. Of course not all games benefit and not all cards will follow this pattern.

 

[BUFF]

Unless playing at stupidly high resolutions/quality (& you won't be doing that on £50 cards) usually 1 better range (i.e. 8800 over 8600) card beats 2 cheaper in SLI.

 

[Mr. Smith]

That article makes no reference to any modern game, nor OS or test set up (unless I missed that as I had a quick glance).

For certain games there is a marked improvement, for others there isn't.

A better analysis would be to look at the improvement of sli performance over a period of time, looking at older games like oblivion to new games like bioshock.

I think for the money, one high end card is best.

 

[nrage]

That article makes no reference to any modern game, nor OS or test set up (unless I missed that as I had a quick glance).

True. It's just a roundup of the results from their last vga chart article, which contains more detailed information about hardware and testing enviroment.

For certain games there is a marked improvement, for others there isn't.

A better analysis would be to look at the improvement of sli performance over a period of time, looking at older games like oblivion to new games like bioshock.

I think for the money, one high end card is best.

That's my impression too, though when I bought my mobo recently I made sure it had 2 16x PCI-E just in case things improve in the future.

 

[koganinja]

get one high end card has my one card seems to beat alot of peps sli set ups

and bioshock with every thing on max and v sync and im still pumping out 70-80 fps

so just get on decent card and that will do:wavey:

 

[Rastalovich]

Imo, with a buying guide of £50 a card, I`d rather get a single £100 card and not have so many driver issues. Less power, less heat, less things to go wrong or be incompatible.

Meh, imo.

 

[kataras]

^^^^^^^ I agree. With SLI its just so much you have to think of: Drivers, PSU, Heat. The compatibility, some games will give even less FPS than one card. Id definitely go for one high-end card than two middle range sli'ed

 

[AdamThomspon]

Thanks guys, wow speedy responce.

Do any of you have any suggestions on what the requirments for running FSX at full graphics is?. That's why I want to make my own system because I want a good gaming pc without getting ripped off from Alienware and the likes.

At the minute my thinking is running 4GB Ram, Vista, Intelcore Core 2 Quad and motherboard and graphics are the two I'm unsure of at the minute. I know FSX needs a lot.

Adam

 

[Mr. Smith]

Microsoft Flight Simulator X comes on 2 DVDs and requires approximately 14 gigabytes of hard drive space to install. Although official minimum system requirements call for a 1.0 GHz CPU, 256 MB RAM and a 32 MB DirectX 9 compatible video card, much more powerful hardware is needed to achieve good performance with visual settings increased beyond the lowest values. With anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering either disabled or reduced, low-end and even some dated graphics cards, such as NVIDIA's 7300 GT and ATI's X800 will perform respectably at relatively low resolutions (ie. 1024x768), even with all other visual options maximized.[8] However, as of 2007, the game remains bottlenecked at the CPU, even with the latest high-end hardware, struggling to maintain a frame rate above 30 per second at low settings.[9] It is possible that this may be corrected with the upcoming second service pack, or the expansion, Flight Simulator X: Acceleration.

Why you want want to play it is beyond me but it sounds like for small res anything will be fine but you need all the patches and a decent quad core with a 8800GTX... 2 or 4gb... for bigger res...

 

[AdamThomspon]

Ok thanks,

I knew that the specs are low and if you have them and try and run it then, yes it runs but stupidly slow. But I didn't know about the upcoming patches etc. Thanks

 

[Mr. Smith]

No problem mate. It does say a 7300 ran it at small res but graphics maxed...

So are you buying a new rig? What is your budget? You should overclock whatever you buy anyway...

 

[koganinja]

4gb ram is ok but some top sech 2 gig will do the same job dominator 8500 are good for 1250 mhz at 5-5-5-15 2.2v or 1200 5-5-5-14 at 2.3v or standerd 1060 5-5-5-15 at 2.1v

e6600 quad will do nicely oc to 3.4-4.0 gig easy on water and 3.2 -3.6 on air 1.45 to 1.5volts max

650 680i x38 or a p35 board

8800 gts/gtx

and a 500 wat psu min 600-700 would be beter

 

[Mr. Smith]

My experience of 2 sets of Corsair Dominators is - they are the worst ram ever made.

2 sets, both DOA's.

OCZ, Cellshock, Ballistix, Geil = happy face.