View Full Version : To SLI or not to SLI
Ok
Time for a upgrade i think and wanted to know if you good timeless people have any ideas, at the moment i have a 8400gs gf card and was wondering wether to get say 2 9500GT cards in sli mode or spend a little more and get 1 card say a 9800GT or a Radeon 4850 ( the last 2 were recomended to me ) any thought welcome.
Thx
BR72
Tankster-Pete
15-06-2009, 10:11
Ok
Time for a upgrade i think and wanted to know if you good timeless people have any ideas, at the moment i have a 8400gs gf card and was wondering wether to get say 2 9500GT cards in sli mode or spend a little more and get 1 card say a 9800GT or a Radeon 4850 ( the last 2 were recomended to me ) any thought welcome.
Thx
BR72
Hi ...
1. - Do you have a Mainboard with NVidia Chipset ? (without - no SLI possible)
2. - SLI means double heat and power consumption, so a single 4850 is better (power/speed wise)
3. - The 9´s are the "old" NVidias, the 48`s are the new "kinds on the block" from AMD/ATI ... 2 x 95GT in SLI must not be faster than a single 4850 ...
4. - Overall - SLI is mostly useless for the games we play, single card solutions are normally fast enought. Even if you go with a AMD 4870X2 or a NVidia 295GTX, a single card (X2 or 295) is far easier to handle as 2 x 4870(in crossfire) or 2 x 285(in SLI) ...
Not to speak from the "so called" bad driver profiles if you have more than 1 card in your system ...
Hint: If you enter your system specs in your user cp - we can see what mainboard/cpu etc you have :)
thanks pete
i have a m2n-e sli mainboard with 4800x2 cpu vista 64,(other info is on xfire as i cant recall rest at the mo)
I think pete is right BUT
I was running 2 6600GTs on SLi which I recently upgraded to one 9800GT
frankly my system was a bit more stable and seemed to handle gaming better with the old cards.....
make what you will of that
btw 9500's suck, I have not read a good review about them at all, you should be able to pick up a 9800 for £20-30 (or your equivilant) more for a much better card....
so why not save up for 1 more month and SLi 2 9800's..
Dont forget your PSU also, let us know what you have now.
I'd go for a single card in your budget, you get what you pay for so find a card from a site
like this : http://www.overclockers.co.uk/productlist.php?&groupid=701&catid=56&sortby=priceAsc&rows=0
and then go find the same model closer to home and cheaper, just :google: the card m8 ;)
1. If u want quality and speed take NVIDIA
2. If u want senseless power waste take AMD/ATI ( This is proofed by me as hardware and gameproducer, NVIDIA has the better Pixel quality with same Speed as ATI but with less power in use. A lot of people take ATI because they are lower in prize, but as already wrote NVIDIA has more quality )
3. Like Pete said, normaly 1 single card is enough to play every game on market. But depends on card u take, i guess with a 9500 u will have probs to max out the game settings from newer games, it will not run smooth and its not worth a pay. A 4850 would be much better, a 9800 would be more better
My 3 cents ;)
__
First, my lil brother bought two 295GTX :shock:
Second, does this really needs to be in VIP, ehrm Advanced...arg you know area, since this could be usefull for :quote:normal:quote: people also?
Greetings:
sdtlc
Thanks for all the advice guys its given me somthing to think about. sorry if i put this in the wrong place ( if the admins wish they can move to a better place )
Thanks
BR72
OK, i moved the thread, this should give you a wider audience to help you (and others) decide m8 ;)
sexytime-24-7
17-06-2009, 20:21
personally i would buy the single better card rather than using sli with lower end cards, first because with demanding games that do not support sli you will see very little/no performance boost from just one card. then as mentioned before the power consumption and extra heat genorated can be big issues. i would recommend the nvidia cards as they do (in my opinion) have better drivers, not to mention cuda, physx and badaboom vidio conversion. i would recommend (if you are getting a 9800gt) to save an extra €20 - €30 and get a gts 250 seeing as the extra money will get you extra performance. hope i helped :)
BaconDude
18-06-2009, 18:20
1 - SLI is extremely expensive (2 cards = expensive)
2 - Very inefficient. Second card will not be able to use 30% of it's available power.
3 - Takes a lot of electricity.
4 - A fair few known problems.
I'd say get a beefy card and leave it at that. Most people don't even need a GTX 260. I have a 8800 GTX and I can run every game under the sun on max graphics.
ok its been a while since i responded to all the help here so again thanks for all the input from everyone. have been doing some investigating on my mobo (M2N-e SLI ) and it looks like it will only run in SLI with XP and not vista64.
thanks once again to timeless peeps who posted.:good2: