A quick glance at SLi.

Juice1

Fully Optimized
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I've seen alot of threads asking questions about SLi, soI decided to write an article (sticky please) to put an end to the hundreds of threads about the same question.

So, what is SLi? SLi is the linking of two graphic cards (GPU) through an SLi bridge. An SLi bridge is a small piece of PCB that connects the two cards together. The bridge can be found with your motherboard accessories. You will obviously need 2 GPUs, but, they need to be exactly identical for this to work. Also, they will need to be nVidia cards, (for ATi cards, see "Crossfire") and your motherboard will need to have 2 or more PCI-express x16 or 2.0 slots, and should be labeled "SLi Compatible." To enable SLi, you will need to install the two cards, then put the SLi bridge over the two small gold feet (approximately half an inch in length, and is found on the outer edge of the GPU.) You will also need to enable "dual GPU" with in your driver utilities software.

SLi gives you the performance of the first card, plus 40% performance of the other card. This means that you get a 40% increase with a second card in SLi. Also note, that while in SLi, you can only use the outputs of the primary card. That means if that for some reason you have more then 2 monitors, you won't be able to use SLi.

For more info straight from nVidia, click here:

http://www.slizone.com/page/slizone_learn.html

Enjoy, and I hope this answers most of the basic questions out there about SLi.

:)
 
I won't sticky it as asked, but I did add it to the guide list.


I though you could only use one monitor in SLI....
 
i think you can use 2 from the main card but u carnt use the 2 on the second card
 
You can two monitors hooked up to the primary card. But you can only use one monitor while in SLI. You can easily switch back to normal mode and then use dual monitors. That's how it's setup with my son's machine. When he plays games, he switches on SLI. For normal use, he turns it off and uses his dual monitors.
 
Oh, well I dunno. My friends build uses sli, and he has 2 monitors. I enabled sli in the nvidia cp, and both still worked, they were both plugged into the first card.
 
Performance scaling varies from a slight decrease in performance over a single card to around a 50% increase in games that are fully optimized for SLI. Make sure the games you are going to play work well with an SLI setup before going out and buying two GPUs.
 
so does this mean that I cant take to 8800GT's (512) and combine SLI them both to get 1 Gigabyte of graphics ram?

Is sli really worth it?
Some games arent even optimized for sli or am i wrong?
 
a lot of games are becoming optimized for dual cards
most tho are only optimized for a single card and a dual core cpu
 
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