SLI or Crossfire

tlarkin

tlarkin

VIP Member
Ok,

So, I haven't been closely following video cards at all but I am in a situation to get a new system for a good price so I am buying a new chip and mobo. I am getting a Core 2 Duo, and an intel board and am probably going to sell the intel board when I get it (its a package deal) and get an SLI or a CF board.

Now, I have read through all the reviews and it seems they perform pretty much equally.

So, it seems the best way to go is what I can get for the best price?

I play CSS, BF2, Farcry (and will play Crysis when it comes out) some various RTS games.

I would like to play this with AA and resolution maxed. I don't necessarily need the most up to date cards because it takes a while for games to catch up to the technology, even though that seems to be somewhat untrue today, it is still the case. There are of course exceptions.

I want reliability over bench mark scores. If rig A beats rig B by 5fps but sometimes runs amuck or whatever I would go with the stability.

I just want some info, and real info not stuff copy and pasted from webpages, I can google things myself (and I have). What problems/benefits do you have with SLI or CF?
 
It sounds like you have quite a high budget if you are planning on SLI or CF right away.

1. I would wait until DX10 to come out and load up with a sick card

2. I would NOT go SLI or CF right off the build, rather get one X1900XT or 7950GX2 or something that will play all games maxed out then upgrade later on
 
no my budget is not that high, but I am getting rid of some older things like an older ibook, and I am getting the proc/mobo/OS for $200 through a special package deal

I have extra optical drives lying around the house, so I would need ram and a hard drive. I am gutting my current case (lan boy) and tossing its hardware in my server tower and replacing my old PIII 800E linux server with something a bit more up to date.

Since I have extra parts, and am getting such a good deal I am thinking about spending a bit of extra money on SLI/CF

However, I am not convinced that it makes that huge of a difference yet. I do like your advice maybe I should start off with one card.

I was looking at the 7600GT on newegg since it was around 140ish per a card.
 
tlarkin said:
I was looking at the 7600GT on newegg since it was around 140ish per a card.
Click to expand...

Getting an SLI of 2 budget card is a very bad idea. The performance is not as good as just getting one $260 bucks card, probably 7900GTO or something like that.
 
See, why is that? Does it bottle neck?

Also, what would be the performance of buying two in the middle cards and using something like the riva tuner?

Anyone ever dealt with any of this?
 
i was looking up the difference between SLI and Corssfire and arent they the same thing>?
SLI - This is a technology from Nvidia that allows 2 PCIE graphics cards in the same computer system to be linked, thus sharing the load of the image being created. Cards in SLI are linked via a small hardware bridge. This makes for some hugley powerful gaming systems

Crossfire- A technology from ATI graphics, allowing 2 PCIE graphics cards in the same computer system to be linked. The 2 cards are linked externaly by a DVI like connector. The cards then work together to render the image.

what exactly is the difference
 
dark_legacy2006 said:
what exactly is the difference
Click to expand...

The idea is the same, but they way they address multiple cards are different.

I wouldnt go with 2x 7600GT's either, because you can buy a 7900GTO which will be better, for about the same price, and the thing with SLI/CF is that it doesnt work well with all games or benchmarks, so you wont see much of an imrpovement overa single card in some games.
 
Ford/Chevy I suppose would be a good way to look at it.

They are both about running dual GPUs. However, my questions are more about performance/$$$

Someone just posted that running two lower end cards in CF/SLI performs less than just one single higher end card. Video cards are pretty expensive and I would like to keep my SLI/CF costs just under or around $200.00 each per card.

Also, would it even be better to just drop the idea of SLI/CF and maybe go with one of those physics rendering cards instead and a single GPU?

http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/06/19/can_ageia/

Even though it seems physics cards may not become the new trend, it is definitely a possibility.
 
if you want to keep it at 200 per card, then you'll have about $400 total. I would take that money and wait till the new DX10 cards come out and get a good one, instead of spreading it out on two DX9 cards.

SLI/Crossfire doesn't not offer 100% performance boost, in fact, it doesn't even nearly give that much. You'll only see a major difference when you're running games at high resolutions and stuff.
 
wait wait wait,

crossfire splits the load up between the cards much better and the outcome is allot better

sli splits the screen in two, one card is always doing more..

corssfire splits the screen into a checkerboard sortof thing :)

CROSSFIRE FTW!
 
Bradan said:
wait wait wait,

crossfire splits the load up between the cards much better and the outcome is allot better

sli splits the screen in two, one card is always doing more..

corssfire splits the screen into a checkerboard sortof thing :)

CROSSFIRE FTW!
Click to expand...

Except that sli beats crossfire in most situations. Sli is a more convient setup and requires less of certain requirements if you know what I mean.
 
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