Quesetion on SLI performance

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vector2005

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I've posted in the general hardware forum items i was looking at buying for an upgrade. I had seen a few posts that mentioned at higher resolutions it was recommended to use sli. I currently have a dell 24" widescreen that has a native resolution of 1920x1200. I'm doing the upgrade in phases, the first being the motherboard, cpu, and ram. The second will be the video card or cards and a few other items.

The part i'm undecided on is if i should look towards sli. If i don't go sli I'll be purchasing the gigabyte ds3 board. If i do go sli i'm not for sure, I have 3 boards picked out. the Asus A5N-E SLI, which is the same prices as the DS3, or either the asus a5n32-e sli or the evga eVGA 680i-AR

My questions are:

1. Being that i'm running 1920x1200 for games should i look at doing sli?
2. Whats the performance difference/advantage for sli between running the pci-e slots in x8 mode (p5ne-sli) vs both slots running at x16 (evga and a5n32e-sli).

I realize that any opinion/information given now will be based off what is currently availible and not what is down the road.
 
My recomendation is to get an SLI capable board regardless if you decide to go through with SLI... You can simply start off with a single card, if you feel you need/want more performance, you simply buy another one of those cards and go SLI.
 
The problem with SLI ready boards is that the nVidia chipset boards are rather a headache on their own. They still aren't as stable and reliable as Intel 965/975 chipset boards. If trouble free performance is one of your priorities go with an Intel based or even Intel branded board and a single 8800 GTX. If you can wait a bit the nVidia G80 refresh video boards in 60-70 days (perhaps) will certainly be more than fast enough for any game in existence at 1920 x 1200.
 
The video card purchase will most like be sometime during the summer so that does fit the time frame. The main reason for this post was to help me determine what motherboard to get and SLI is the big question right now. I posted the questions yesterday without doing any detailed research in the video card forums, but intend to do that today.

Thanks for the responses so far
 
So far I've had a response each way. The main question that is still up in there air is whats the performance difference between running sli with both slots in x8 mode compared to the slots being in x16.
 
Thanks for the article link, it did give me some insight into the differences but with the article being almost 2 years old, I still wonder what the impact is now. The article was based on products before sli was availible. It even went as far to conclude that anything above x4 would not show a noticable difference. I find it hard to believe that this could still hold true for the games and video cards that are currently out, but i have been proven wrong in the past
 
This is just one persons experience obviously, but I have had *zero* issues with the eVGA 680i board and a loving SLI. I bought a bit later though. I think they may have snuck out a "rev 2" on a lot of these 680i boards. Either that or the later BIOS updates fixed most issues. My board came with rev 24 of the eVGA BIOS. I can honestly say that this has been the best board/vid card experience Ive had in 20 years of building PCs and that includes back when I was doing 3DFX SLI ;)

I saw a steady scale up in FPS in games like FEAR going from X1900XTX to 8800GTX to SLI on both the AMD FX-60 and with the QX6700 and now QX with a decent OC.
 
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