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Some advice on SLi please

Inaharry

Inaharry

Inaharry

Associate
Joined
3 Aug 2004
Posts
252
Hi all,

I bought some components from OcUk at the beginning of last year, a C2D E6600, 2GB Corsair Dominator 8500C5D, Asus Striker Extreme 680i, a BFG 8800GTX (not OC - not available at the time) and an Enermax Galaxy 1000W PSU.

I've been running Vista Ultimate 32Bit quite happily for ages now without any thoughts of upgrading yet, but then I noticed the XFX 8800GTX XXX Edition that's appeared on this week only for £135 and I'm in a dilemma....

I can't afford to do any major upgrades at the moment like changing to a GTX 280, I originally thought that I'd wait for the 8800GTXs to come down in price and SLi mine to give me extra performance on Crysis etc, but as usual rather than the cards being reduced, they're phased out and are no longer available, or if they are, you end up paying more than the newer cards.

Is it worth me buying the XFX card while it's so cheap? I'm concerned that if I don't bother, I'll never get the chance to SLi my system because 8800GTX cards will no longer be available or should I be putting my money to a different card? (I can't see any new single card solution that's in the same £135 price range that would give me 2x 8800GTX SLi performance...)

One other thing, I was thinking of adding another 2Gb Corsair Dominator 8500C5D modules to give me 4GB. I know that Vista 32Bit will only see around 3-3.5GB, but does anyone know whether I'll get the Asus and 4GB problem that I've read about using this config. I've never had any problems with the 2GB I've got.

If anyone can offer some advice, I'd be really grateful.

Thanks.
 
You would think that running two x 8800GTXs would double the frame rate but in truth this isn't the case. In fact you'd see little or no benefit unless you play games with resolutions > 1920..
 
Admiral Huddy said:
You would think that running two x 8800GTXs would double the frame rate but in truth this isn't the case. In fact you'd see little or no benefit unless you play games with resolutions > 1920..
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not entirelly true, i use a 9800 GX2 at 1366x768 and notice big improvements in most games with sli enabled.go for the GTX SLI as in most games, that will beat the GTX280 in most games and costs a lot less
 
I have the same spec as you but 2 gtxs in sli. when it works with supported games expect around a 25 percent increase in framerate .although
some games dont respond well to sli, grid for example doesnt like sli atm. unless you could sell your gtx plus the 135 notes and get a 4870 x2 when they are released i dont think imo you could get a better upgrade . but expect some games not to play ball.:)
 
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I say get the second GTX and SLI... I play at 1440x900 and 1920x1200 (depending on the game and if I'm playing online or not) and even at 1440x900 with an 8800GT SLI setup I see a massive performance increase from SLI in many games.

Using 1440x900 I see these in the games I play most:

COD4 - SLI feels great - smooth and big fps boost (typical 150fps to 250fps)

Mass Effect - SLI doesn't work too good - cutting out entirely in some areas and often if you pull out your weapon - moderate boost when it does work tho. (typical 45fps to 60fps)

BioShock - huge boost even at 1280x1024 type resolutions. (typical 56fps to 109fps)

City of Heros - decent gains with both SFR and AFR (even tho the default profile doesn't use SLI so you have to tweak yourself) (typical 48fps to 90fps).

At higher resolutions it is much closer to double the performance.

There are games that don't work with SLI tho - but the majority do.
 
Thanks very much for all the feedback, it really helped. Sounds like most of the SLi supported games are the ones I play anyway.

I've just placed the order, so..........something for the weekend :D (I nearly ordered two for 3-way SLi ;), but the wife would've killed me!!:eek:)
 
Leebone said:
2 x 8800gtx got me to 9th place at crysis very high benchie even with an e6600 above all those quads and wolfdales!::D
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Nice.....Maybe I should attempt to do some overclocking, still stuck at stock speeds on cpu, mem and graphics for the sake of stability with the striker extreme, but seeing your results make me wanna try;)
 
Rroff said:
3-way SLI isn't that great - nothing like the gains (3 over 2) you get from 2 cards (2 over 1) in most cases.
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Yeah, I was just reading something about that, in some games the difference was as little as 3-4fps:(

So, I used the excuse that instead of the 3rd card, I'd buy the extra memory instead cos it worked out cheaper - now I'll have to hope I don't see my ol' friend Bruce Scrinnodef when they meet the Striker Extreme and the other two modules :p
 
Inaharry said:
Nice.....Maybe I should attempt to do some overclocking, still stuck at stock speeds on cpu, mem and graphics for the sake of stability with the striker extreme, but seeing your results make me wanna try;)
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Yeah good nforce boards are few and far between. This was my 3rd board back from evga finally got one of the "good" ones.
 
Inaharry said:
:eek:3rd board?? maybe i'll try some small OCs to start with...:)
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Yeah , overclockers service was great. My 1st 680i was fine for bout 7 months then i started having ram related bsods and read that some boards were killing modules by over-volting. tryed 3 sets and finnaly gave up and sent back. 2nd board they sent to me without the chipset cooling fan to the northbridge, needless to say that didnt last very long, got an error code for the memory controller. Finnally got this one and its been brilliant, rock solid for 3 months.Touch wood.:D
 
Well.....installed the second 8800GTX, made sure Vista had SP1 to support SLi properly, got hold of the latest drivers from Nvidia's site and set up SLi in the CP and then ran 3DMark06....... :(

It wasn't until I had a look around at everybody else's results that I realised how bad mine were! When I had the single GTX, I was getting 8400, adding the second card got me 8470 and the details show linked cards as false. I've tried uninstalling 3dMark06 and downloading the whole 1.1.0 again etc but still get the same problem. Turning on the SLi visual indicators in the Nvidia CP shows the green bar when running 3DMark06, but the system spec details still only show 1 card. I'm starting to think that I might have to wipe everything and re-install Vista again from scratch which I didn't want to do :mad:

Even so, a score of 8400 with a single 8800GTX seems low compared to a lot I've seen, but then I'm running everything at stock speeds, does OC'ing just the CPU make the kind of difference I saw in the 3DMark thread here on OcUK (where some of the single cards were scoring 12-14000?

If there are any OC'ing or 3DMark gurus out there that could let me know, it'd be really helpful. Thanks!
 
3D Marks 06 usually shows co-operative adapters as false even on SLI setups...

Assuming you have FSAA OFF, AF OFF, high performance settings in the nVidia control panel and the CPU running at atleast 3gig you should get around 15K in SLI mode.
 
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