Have the requirements for SLI changed then?

[MeatLoaf]

I recently went to look at a mates PC to fit him a new CPU cooler. I asked him his spec and he listed it out and i was suprised to see he had both a 9800GTX+ and GTS250. I initially thought he was running one as a main card and the other as a physx card but upon closer inspection they appear to be running in SLI.

I ran a few benchies both with SLI enabled and disabled and there was a noticible improvement over a single card.

He has an i7 rig so maybe its something with the new chipset i dont know.

Has anyone else done this?

 

[JonJ678]

Can probably sli those, as the cards are nearly identical. I'm not sure if you'd need to do anything the the bios of one of them or not. A 9800gtx with a 260 wouldn't work at all as far as I know.

If sli now allows wildly dissimilar cards I'd also be interested, but I was fairly sure it's only crossfire which does that. I suspect you have heard the same thing,

 

[Trunks9486]

Both cards are based on g92b i think, so it makes sense that sli would work.

 

[Nick1881]

That's news to me. Wonder if I could SLI a 260 or 275 with my 280.

 

[MeatLoaf]

Well it was new to me as well really, the only slightly different cards i knew it would work with is the 192sp and 216sp GTX 260 cards.

Im considering getting a cheapo 8800GT if one comes up on MM and trying it with my 9800GT.

Or it could be something with the X58 which makes it possible that the nforce chipsets dont allow

 

[kerrgreg]

It wont be the X58 making a differance i thought like ati there was a compatiblity list of cards and that most were now compatiable as they ran at their native speeds? but maybe im wrong ( most probs)

 

[AMG]

crossfire apprently don't need the same type of card ware as SLI does apprnetly

 

[Geckovich]

9800gtx and gts250 are the same card, there should be no issues with SLI.

 

[MeatLoaf]

9800gtx and gts250 are the same card, there should be no issues with SLI.

So is the 8800GTX and 8800 Ultra, just the ultras higher clocked.

The 8800GT and 9800GT are the same as well and as far as i know they wont work together either

Anyone in the stoke area got an 8800GT so we can test it?

 

[Rroff]

I don't know about overall... but the 9800GT and 8800GT that I tried wouldn't SLI out the box, but a couple of firmware tweaks later they were happily co-existing

Possibly in newer drivers nVidia have relaxed the requirements and allowing cards of the same chipset to SLI.

You really don't want to be able to SLI card of widely different performance either... from my experiences with customising vid card BIOS to get cards working together if theres more than ~20-25% performance gap between teh cards you get a noticeable "rubber-band" feel to the rendering.