SLI Primer

GFXguy writes "If you are looking to catch up on some hardware learning you may want to check out "SL Why?". It is a short article that goes over the basics of SLI graphics. The article goes over some strengths and weaknesses of this technology as well. It looks like one video card is not going to cut it any more, at least for the hardcore gamers out there. "

Comments

Voodoo

[grahamsz]

Anyone else remember doing this with the old 3dfx voodoo cards... seems so long ago.

Re:Voodoo

[hungsolo]

All the old 3Dfx guys got hired by nVidia. I'm only surprised it took them this long to actually implement this "new" SLI.

Re:Voodoo

[muckdog]

it took the release of the PCI-X spec to make it possible. AGP was designed for only one board

AFR / SFR error

[dbretton]

Doom 3 runs in SFR, not AFR as the article states.

Other upgrades

[bigtallmofo]

I think it likely after RTFA that other upgrades would give you more of a boost for your money. For instance, setting up an IDE RAID 5 array with a read/write caching hardware RAID controller would give almost everyone a huge speed increase for all of their applications, not just graphics ones.

Even just adding a second fast hard drive and placing your paging file on that with your OS on your first hard drive would give most users a big bump in speed.

I could go on, but I think on a list of 10 things to do, taking advtange of SLI is probably number 9 or 10.

Re:Other upgrades

[bigtallmofo]

I disagree with what you said "These systems do not have any use for a paging file." If you have more than 1 gigabyte of memory in your workstation and you run some variant of Windows, I invite you to test this for yourself.

Just run Performance Monitor (or Performance or whatever your version of Windows calls it) and add the following metrics:

Pages/Sec from the Memory Object
Average Disk Queue Length (total) from the physical disk object

Even if your memory used is nowhere near what your physical memory is, you will notice two things:

1. Your system still consistently uses the paging file
2. Every time your system uses the paging file, your disk queue length spikes

The moral of the story is, you need a fast disk subsystem for your paging file because Windows will use it even if you have 4 gigabytes of physical ram and are only using 256 megs.

As for RAID 0 vs RAID 5 in speed, what you say is true for writes, but not reads.

Re:Scalable Link Interface?

[ZagNuts]

I thought SLI stood for Scan Line Interleaving. "Scaleable Link Interface" is completly vauge. Did they change the technology and keep the old name, or is this writer just an idiot?

Upon further investigation it seems that nVidia's SLI stands for "Scaleable Link Interface", but you are correct in noting that it used to stand for "Scan Line Interleaving". They likely wanted to keep the acronym so that people would know what the technology's function was, but Scan Line Interleaving would be non-despcriptive, as their cards don't interleave at all, each renders approximately half of the screen.

Re:Maybe something I'll look into

[way2trivial]

you do realize how spot on identicle they must be?

same revision, same card almost?

ever tried to add a 2nd CPU to a multi CPU system 18 months later?

SLI-who needs it?

[Watersharer]

For some of us, SLI is not a new technology, although the current method is slightly different than the old VooDoo SLI. But after years of gaming, one thing stands out to me. You DON'T need the latest and greatest stuff to run games in most cases. Better to use your hardware budget wisely than to splurge on ultra-swank single components.

I run an AMD 1700, on an ABIT mainboard, with an old ATI9600. Not the pro, but the $79 budget card. I have no exotic cooling, just a nice sink and fan. I added a good copper fan unit to the videocard, which came with passive cooling. I use the features of the Abit MB to run the 1700 at 2.11Ghz, and the video got a 80Mhz bump. I see over 70fps in the CS:Source test, and average around 55-60 online. All for about the cost of one video card.

Re:FUD Biased Article with Inaccuracies

[Dragoon412]

#5) No benefit. "From what I heard, more than a few games realize no FPS gains at all from the addition of a second video card". First, this is rumor. Many games realize no benefit at low resolutions (640x480, some at 800x600) because the games are more CPU bound than video card bound. All the games that are SLI compatible definitely realize solid FPS gains. Moreover, those gains can be "converted" into graphics enhancements (i.e. no need to go from 60fps to 95 fps, but now you can turn on 8xAA or up the screen resolution, etc.)

Relative to the cost, the performance gain for SLI is negligable. Take a look at the benchmarks - for the $1100+ you'd spend on a pair of 6800 Ultras, or the $750+ you'd spend on a pair of 6800 GTs, you could obtain nearly identical performance with a $525 X850XT PE, with far less wattage and heat.

#6) Dual GPU cards. The author obviously doesn't know what he's talking about here. The Gigabyte dual GPU card is just an SLI solution on a single graphics card. It's (almost) exactly the same as having 2x6600GT cards. It uses the same technology and produces the same results. So what's this viable new technology on the horizon he is talking about?

That Gigabyte single-board SLI implimentation? It's a big piece of crap.

Roundup

[haelduksf]

For anyone who is interested, Anandtech has posted a round-up of the four SLI boards on the market (DFI, ASUS, MSI & Gigabyte) which includes some conclusions of their own about usability, value and performance.

Re:PC vs Console - TCO

[untaken_name]

consoles just don't cut the muster

Did you intentionally mix this metaphor? If not, you probably meant 'pass muster'. Alternatively, you might have meant 'cut the mustard'. Either way, you don't 'cut the muster'.

Cut the mustard

Pass Muster

Please don't flame me. I'm just trying to help; I'm not intending any disparagement whatsoever. You are, of course, free to ignore my advice entirely.