Triple GFX Card Question

[evilmogsy]

Hi guys,

I have a question about my system, I have an AMD Phenom 9950 Black Edition on an MSI K9 Diamond AM2+ Board, I currently have 2 X Nvidia 9800GT 512MB installed but have another spare. The board supports 3 cards but the cards themselves do not support triple sli mode due to them only having one sli bridge connector each (i think the GTX has 2). My question is this, would there be any point installing card number 3 and running them seperately or should i just keep 2 of them in sli mode. Sli is currently disabled anyway due to having 3 monitors running and sli only supports 2.

Many thanks in advance.

Glen

 

[Orcvader]

No point, seeing as the third card will sit there doing nothing wasting power. Unless you get it to do PhysX.

 

[Randomface74]

Not worth it.

 

[ThomasTheTankEngine]

Well......if you want to have sli and three monitors then you could install it, and run the third monitor from the non-sli graphics card.

 

[datalol-jack]

It would only be worthwhile as a dedicated PhysX card, which would free up your main pair for the rendering tasks only. If you play PhysX intensive games and/or use a range of GPGPU software, then there won't be any real harm in hooking it up.

 

[DavyBoy]

pointless exersize imo, unless of course you play games that use GPU accelerated PhysX ( which I don't think there are too many tbh) then the 3rd card could be use as a dedicated PPU.

And yes, you're right, it's the 9800GTX and GTX+ that has the twin SLI connectors for Tri SLi.

 

[evilmogsy]

Many thanks for all your answers, might just let it keep catching dust in the cellar

 

[Rroff]

There are some 9800GT cards with the tri-SLI fingers but I'm not sure if nVidia even enabled tri-SLI support for them in the drivers... if they did you may even be able to get it working in bridgeless mode - tho the recent drivers seem to dislike that.

All in all tho the 3rd card would be using a lot of power, pumping out a lot of heat and not really contributing significantly to rendering performance much of the time.