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What are the real world advantages of SLI/XFire?

SLI good if you already have the fastest single cards, or as already noted work out cheaper than a simlar powered single card solution.

The bad, your electric bill will go up. :D
 
Sasahara said:
SLI good if you already have the fastest single cards, or as already noted work out cheaper than a simlar powered single card solution.

The bad, your electric bill will go up. :D
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Why does it have to be the best single cards to pair? most of the time mid range ones come very close, so basically you are spending maybe 150-200 more for something like a 10% increase.
 
It does not have to be the best card to pair up, but it helps.

I have 4 SLI setups, and the 2 lowest are not going to rock anyones boat, but they are certainly better than being on their own, and even a pair of 6600GT cards can play Medal of Honour airborne ( admittedly at low res ) but they are still capable.

My main PC is running a pair of 280GTX's ( No, thats not true, I put one in another box, so right now Im not running SLI on this PC ) and in truth, there is absolutely no difference at all in the game play between a single card and SLI in any of my games.

I say any of my games, these are at this time, the Dawn Of War family, plus UnReal 3. and I have NOT done any benchmarks ( Dont see why? - If I cannot notice it then if the benchmark tells me otherwise then the placebo effect will come into it ).

However, the 7800GTX Pair I bought just recently are certainly worthy opponents for a nice little setup as an SLI pair, but on their own... They are not much.

I am running some benchmarks soon however, only for my own curiosity and I am comparing SLI vs NON-SLI on all my LSI capable systems to get an idea... This will also let me see the difference between CPUs too because my AMD Opteron with 2x7800GTX is absolutely killing my Q6600 & X1900XT
 
If your not noticing a difference between 260GTX SLI and single then you can't be playing at a res and settings that need it. At 2048x res and max settings the difference is like night and day.

I'm not sure what the last comment about CPUs shows coz the Q6600 is wasted on a x19x0 card... you might as well stick a single core P4 in there.
 
Perfect_Chaos said:
Why does it have to be the best single cards to pair? most of the time mid range ones come very close, so basically you are spending maybe 150-200 more for something like a 10% increase.
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If you want midrange cards it's probably cheaper to get the X2 cards. I'd like to say the GTX 295, but it's rather expensive, but if you want the best it's hard to beat 2 GTX 295. (Maybe 3 GTX 285s, but there are considerly less mobos that support that)

And I did say it's good if it worked out cheaper than single card solution of the same power.
 
You'd have to be playing at 2560x res to justify getting 2x 295GTX heh. (Or do some serious folding/CUDA stuff).

TBH atm with the 260GTX at under £140 all in theres absolutely no reason to go SLI/CF unless you play at or above 1920x and even at 1920x the 260 cuts it unless your an FPS junky like myself.

Sure you could go for something like 4850 or 4770 CF and get slightly higher performance overall but that would set you back £160+ and still rely on multiGPU working.

The 8800GT SLI was a great test case as it was almost HALF the price for 2 cards (compared to the top end cards) and gave you BETTER performance than the then current top end card.
 
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Well i care about FPS more than anything so depending on when the next seriously graphically intensive games like Doom 4 come out, thats when i will be upgrading. So if it takes 2 of the best midrange cards or an X2 etc.. then i'd get that, some may say its overkill for a 22" but i dont really think so.
 
FatRakoon said:
I agree, and why not.

Its better to have power you dont need than need power you dont have.
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I wouldn't say don't need, maybe for some games but not all :).

I am surprised no monitors have come out like CRT's yet to be honest, by that i mean something like an LCD nice and slim but you can drop the resolution a bit and it wouldn't look grainy if you had a bigger one but wanted steady FPS, i think that is spoiling it a little bit for people with much bigger screens.
 
Perfect_Chaos said:
I wouldn't say don't need, maybe for some games but not all :).

I am surprised no monitors have come out like CRT's yet to be honest, by that i mean something like an LCD nice and slim but you can drop the resolution a bit and it wouldn't look grainy if you had a bigger one but wanted steady FPS, i think that is spoiling it a little bit for people with much bigger screens.
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Of course thats a given.

Clearly I meant that its nice to have a 300GTX Quad-Turbo-Mega-Pro and play Crysis and the occasional PacMan with ease than it is to have a SIS playing PacMan but wanting to play Crysis and not being able to.

CRT v LCD
I agree fully, but then, I have only converted half my PCs to LCD... The CRT screens though are brand new and only cost me £15 a pop and they give a brilliant 1280x1024 display... No need to go higher really... Not for plonking about on a LAN.
 
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