Widescreen Gaming Forum

hi,

i've got a 22" widescreen, 1680x1050 native res monitor...(a rather nice 5ms HP model, actually) and am soon going to be buying a new system...

i considering going for an SLI solution using 2 x 8800GTS's...prob the 640mb one...

i've seen plenty of benchies that state that at 1024x768 most single cards beat dual...1280x1024 is about the same, but that at higher res's SLI/CROSSFIRE start to go out in front...?

i mostly play BF2, but i am SO looking forward to Crysis, COD4 and GTA4...


so my question is this...would it be worth me getting a second card and an SLI mobo...?


will it make that much of a difference?

8)

First of all, no.

Second, GT? GT what? (yeah probably the GTS) there are GTS and GTX. Neither of which is worth to get 2 of them for that resolution.

First of all, no.

Second, GT? GT what? (yeah probably the GTS) there are GTS and GTX. Neither of which is worth to get 2 of them for that resolution.

sorry i meant GTS's (i hadn't finished editing the post, you were too quick!)


ok thx for your reply :)


can you explain your reasoning?


for me the GTX's and Ultras are waaaaay to expensive considering how fairly close they are to the GTS's...


i just built two systems using a single 8800GTS each and got them for £175 each from novatech...some of the GTX's are like over £300 each!...hence this idea...i know that the 2900pro is close, performance-wise tho...and the XT, i just prefer nvidia, right now...

Too much power for not enough gain.

GTS has no problems to push games at that resolution, or even higher.

You pay (your prices) 600GBP for two GTX and in 3-4 months you can get 1 card for half the money for that performance.
Waste of money SLI.

Plus, if you use DX10, they are not DX10.1 capable.


Either get a single GTS or wait a couple of months to get a single next generation card.

SLI and Crossfire are good for bragging rights, or if you're a performance freak that absolutely must be at the bleeding edge (your wallet certainly will) but other that that, it's not really all that worth it. ;)

Here, especially at the mentioned resolution, the phrase "If you have to ask..." comes to mind. That phrase is used many ways including with the endings, "...you're probably doing something wrong.", "...you probably won't understand.", etc.

Applied here it can mean over-complicating something due to lack of need and/or understanding. SLI and Crossfire are a lot like that, unnecessary complications. I still think it's absurd that SLI caught on so big considering many games don't support it.

That being said, I am very much a gadget freak and follow advances in technology. I've never thought a gadget freak is one to just collect lots of gadgets for the sake of having them though, that defines a pack rat instead I think.

To me, gadgets have to make sense, better yet if they're affordable and versatile. I hate to say it but ATI has Nvidia beat on the latter two, though their poor driver and customer support is unacceptable to me after owning an X800XT for a few years now. Besides that the sheer lack of competitive performance in ATI's latest AGP hardware is quite underwhelming. When it comes right down to it though, SLI caters to the wealthy because if you try to implement it affordably then it REALLY doesn't make sense.

...though [ATi's] poor driver and customer support is unacceptable to me after owning an X800XT for a few years now.

I find ATi's drivers better than nVidia's for the most part. At least they don't need a new driver for almost every game you want to play. :lol:

And I've never needed to use their customer support - although piss-poor customer support seems to be standard faire for almost all companies nowadays. :(

I think you should get an 8800GTX.

I don't like SLI because you lose too much. Its double the price, double the heat, double the power draw, but its not double the speed. So you aren't really getting value for money. If I was you, I would just but an 8800GTX. And unless you plan on watercooling the graphics card, just buy a cheap brand, because they are all pretty much the same.

:?:

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I find ATi's drivers better than nVidia's for the most part. At least they don't need a new driver for almost every game you want to play. :lol:

And I've never needed to use their customer support - although piss-poor customer support seems to be standard faire for almost all companies nowadays. :(

It's not how many drivers you need to update to, it's whether there's one available that actually works. Although there are many examples of ATI's lousy drivers and CS, I'll give just two.

When Cat 5.7 came out all of a sudden none of the Medal of Honor games would work on it, including the then 2 expansions Spearheard and Breakthrough. On a call to ATI a few months after this had gone on and tech savvy gamers had discussed on Rage3D there was a workaround for it discovered by a gamer I found ATI was still oblivious to it even being a problem. On the phone their guy implied those on the Rage3D forum just didn't know how to install the game, drivers, or patches and totally mocked the workaround I mentioned which worked fine.

The workaround involved extracting the OpenGL driver from Cat 5.6, putting it in the game's exe directory, and all of the installments will then work off that driver while the rest of your system uses the latest installed driver, simple but effective. A few months later ATI finally mentioned in their driver release notes there was a problem with the MoH games not playing and they were working on a fix for it. The 1st paragraph of this example speaks for ATI's terrible CS attitude.

The other is their terrible dual display support, mainly in the form of lacking a usable extended desktop mode if your primary display is 4:3 and your secondary is widescreen. This is something that has gone on so long I gave up using Cat drivers long ago for the more stable and useful Omegas. Omega drivers being so widely used for ATI cards is perhaps one of THE biggest arguments against using their products. Such drivers wouldn't even be necessary if they'd write their own properly.