Quick questions to those who SLI their cards.

[Phraust]

First off, you don't need a matched set of cards right? I could use a 285 and a 8800? or do they need to be in the same family?

Second, what happens if you DON'T SLI? does the second card just work like a slave card allowing more monitors? As in the good ol' days when you used a PCI card for a second monitor?

Third question, If you DO SLI 2 cards, say a pair of 9800 GTX's and you got 4 DVI ports and/or 2 HDMI ports, how are monitors configured? and how is the horsepower split?

Most of the posts I been finding are almost exclusively dumping all the horsepower form multiple cards through one 'hole', with a lot of benchmarks, but little to no mention of other options like mult-monitor settups.

Any information would be appreciated.

[Cephius]

First off, you don't need a matched set of cards right? I could use a 285 and a 8800? or do they need to be in the same family?

SLI cards have to be the same family and preferably the same revision/model number to avoid problems.

Second, what happens if you DON'T SLI? does the second card just work like a slave card allowing more monitors? As in the good ol' days when you used a PCI card for a second monitor?

If you don't SLI, the card is pretty much dormant. You could hook up a monitor to it, but it doesn't make much sense because....

Third question, If you DO SLI 2 cards, say a pair of 9800 GTX's and you got 4 DVI ports and/or 2 HDMI ports, how are monitors configured? and how is the horsepower split?

Most of the posts I been finding are almost exclusively dumping all the horsepower form multiple cards through one 'hole', with a lot of benchmarks, but little to no mention of other options like mult-monitor settups.

...Even in SLI, you are limited to 2 monitors. You can't set up a 3rd or more, since both cards are PCI, and you're still stuck with the 2 monitor limitation. To get a 3rd, you need to have a AGP card, or use an external solution. That's why you don't hear much about it. SLI is almost exclusively used for benchmarking/gaming... not for adding more monitors to your setup.

[aalryn]

...Even in SLI, you are limited to 2 monitors. You can't set up a 3rd or more, since both cards are PCI, and you're still stuck with the 2 monitor limitation. To get a 3rd, you need to have a AGP card, or use an external solution. That's why you don't hear much about it. SLI is almost exclusively used for benchmarking/gaming... not for adding more monitors to your setup.

Just as an emphasis, It was only a few months ago when they updated SLI to be able to use two monitors. Before then you were limited to a single monitor when you enabled SLI. This is why I use two computers instead of two monitors.

If you want a 3 or 4 monitor setup you use an external box to control it.


As others have said you want to make sure you use the same video card when you do it or you will run into some major problems. It's preferred to buy the cards at the same time to even get the same revision.

[mootsfox]

You can drive up to four monitors with SLI. You have to set it to multi-GPU mode though.

My info on SLI is a bit dated, last time I ran it was with 7600GSes.