Overkill?

[mlbtheshow]

This is more of a general hardware question although it relates to the components in a laptop, the theory behind it is basic PC hardware and how it works etc

Anyway, so for example in a laptop im pricing up I have added 2 x GTX 485M Graphics Cards to run in SLI.... these I believe are the best there are atm and thus im going to have a pair of them in.

Please can someone explain the premise of SLI and if SLI is that important in generic terms? I mean for example if NVIDIA bring out a new GPU in 1 years time that is 1 and a half times as powerful as 1 485m, does that mean that 2 485Ms in SLI are still better than this new card on its own? Or do the cards not work in that way ie doubling up the power, or do they just take on half the work each?

The 2nd question is regards RAM... I can put in 12GB RAM, now that seems like overkill but if games/apps are looking to use 12GB now or in 6 months then it makes it a necessity. Will i see much difference in everyday gaming/apps that we have today/in the coming year by having 12GB over say 6GB of RAM?

I think im OK based on the rest of the stuff, as I say its regarding a laptop but it will also help me (and maybe others) understand the technology and terms even if I go the desktop route... as SLI etc is just jargon to me tbh

All help appreciated.

 

[ohhbass]

Im not sure about those gfx cards but i can say that my gtx460 do scale very well in sli, practically 2x the performance of 1. I would say that you could expect 1.9x the performance. Some people dont like sli saying they get microstutters, but tbh i havnt noticed this and am quite happy with sli.

In terms of ram im not sure, i have 8gb at the moment, i suppose i could take out 1 stick and compare to 4gb, but not sure what difference dual channel has vs 1 stick, plus it wouldnt really help in deciding 6vs12 lol.

 

[wilko49]

SLI or CF can increase you graphical performance above what is otherwise possible (by using 2 high-end cards), or may be cheaper than buying 1 better card (like my setup). The performance gain varies quite considerably between cards and applications.

The question is more what you plan to use the machine for, and how long you intend to keep it. If it is purely for gaming, I highly doubt you will see games using more than 6GB of RAM in the next year, and probably not for longer than that. Photo/video editing routinely uses 8GB and up. In general use, I rarely peak 2.5GB, and the only time I ever ran out of memory was due to memory leak in Mass Effect 2 (which also filled an 8GB page file, so it didn't really matter how much memory I had).

Do remember that all that hardware is going to kill your battery life.