SLI question...

[Wishy37]

Hi

I'm building a new system for gaming and photoshop primarily, anyhoo I bought a BFG 8800GT OC for my old P4 System and decided to go SLI as I'm building a new rig and wanted as much power as I could muster for the money, I was aware that both cards had to be the same (8800GT's) so I dived in head 1st and bought another BFG 8800GT OC...however it's an OC2 (..dumb ass)

My question is how do I get around this dilema? Do I try and overclock the OC or underclock the OC2? Baring in mind I have never attempted overclocking anything...ever! and will only be using the stock HSF's that came with the boards.

I will be running them (hopefully!) with following components:

Q6600 G0
Arctic Freezer 7 Pro
Asus P5N32-E SLI Plus
Memory (I haven't decided on that yet)
600w OCZ Stealth Xstream PSU (I bought for my old P4 system to run the OC card)
Antec 900 Case (w/ an additional 120mm side panel fan)

Any help would be greatly appreciated

Thanks in advance

 

[J.D]

Welcome to the forums Wishy37 .

The faster card will slow down to the speed of the slower card.

 

[Wishy37]

Thanx for the quick response much appreciated

I can live with that, I take it it will do this automatically?

 

[Rroff]

As the above poster mentioned when you enable SLI mode the faster card will be clocked back to the speed of the slowest card... however that doesn't mean you can't then overclock them back to the speed of the faster card or even beyond and I'd be very suprised if you couldn't get both cards overclocked to atleast the same speeds as the faster card...

 

[Mongy2130]

Not entirely correct if u put the oc2 in the top slot (one closest to the cpu) and the oc1 in the bottom it will overclock the oc1 too oc2 speeds the first card dictates the clockspeeds used

 

[davecarter]

I am pretty sure the slower card will happilly over clock to the speed of the higher card anyway so I wouldnt worry too much about it

 

[Rroff]

Not entirely correct if u put the oc2 in the top slot (one closest to the cpu) and the oc1 in the bottom it will overclock the oc1 too oc2 speeds the first card dictates the clockspeeds used

Thats what I thought... but I'm building a PC around a gigabyte 650i board atm and the default speed for the card in the slot closest to the CPU is 9MHz higher than the other card but in SLI mode its using the speed of the slower card (which is in the left most slot).