Two cards?

[Hort]

Hey gang,

New here. Like many, I suspect, I'm looking to this summer to build a new DX10 worthy (mostly) gaming and (some) graphics designing rig. I built my last rig three years ago and I know just enough to somewhat competency glue one together but I'm no tech pro.

Can some kind soul please point me in the direction of information on the "how's" and "why's" of running TWO video cards? I'm eyeing the 8800GTX or whatever the equivalent/better is by this June (ATI 9800 now).

I need to know more about how two cards work together, what I need to consider, what are the advantages and disadvantages (other than $1200 for vid cards )

Cheers

 

[tisb0b]

2 cards pros and cons

Pros
- when you can get them to work properly you'll have some nice performance
- e-penis

cons:
- incompatibility with some games whereas with a single card your basically guaranteed.
- increased power requirements and noise
- your only getting at most a 50% improvement in performance so therefore not very good value for money.


Basically at this point in time a single 8800GTX handles everything right up to 2568x1600.

 

[Hort]

Thanks for the reply. I'm looking over the NVidia SLI-zone stuff now.
They're claiming 1.95 times increase in performance but I'm aware there's considerable hyperbole there.

 

[kevdog]

is it true that nforce4 chipsets will not take two 8800's?

 

[Xonitex]

There are some situations in which you would get close to a 100% performance gain. Running at high resolutions and detail settings in a supported, demanding game would do it. However, the usual gain is more like 25% to 50%.