The SLI craze that fucked me because I was dumb
Well, it all begun with my birthday in 2012 (19th of July). I was dumb, and I didn't do the research, I didn't pay bills, I just wanted more fps. Ok...So I've thought, why not buy another 560GTX? I would make a nice SLI, enjoy games in more detail, etc... I got the second card and started to google how the fuck I can make this work... After 3 days:
"Well shit" I tought, I have to call my PC guru friend. He told me, before buying it: "don't do this, you will kill the PSU and the performance will not be as good as you hope it will be!"
Oooh, but I didn't listen.
I took the pictures yesterday when I remembered
And where was one, it was another one...
And this was the PSU who actually survived 6 months with this... "built":
So he comes, he sees the damn mess I made, no wire management, no nothing. He starts to do his magic and voila, it works. The benchmarks were looking SO GOOD and I felt like emphasizing that to my friend who advised me against this. Of course I didn't know what kind of stress my PSU had, and never noticed the ever growing coil whine.
In the beginning, everything was good, I remember playing Metro 2033 and Crysis 2 I think it was. The fps was all over the place but hey, I was running on SLI, i was fucking cool... After that some GTA IV which was running like shit despite my config and bullshit sports games like FIFA and NBA. After that I took a little break. After 6 months I started some game, I don't remember which one, but it was graphically intensive, and my PSU starts to make this horror noise, I got scared and unplugged my PC (stupid thing to do I know).
I started to look into it and saw the power consumption figures:
- average around 150w/card - not very intensive games
- peak around 160w/card - intensive games
- maximum around 220w/card - stability benchmarks
I had an I7 920 if I remember correctly.
Imagine how good my idea was... Why did I kept them you may ask... Well, for some reason, I never found the time to put them on sale, and when I had the time I was forgetting about them... The following 2 years I just used on card, and after some time I had to buy a laptop Acer Aspire V3-772G, 17.3" , and when I found a stable place to live in and I got the money for the RX580, I made the recent external GPU build, which you can find here .
So, in conlusion, don't invest in SLI... it's silly and it's just for bragging...
Never used sli or crossfire but i had some friends who ran in to a lot of issue with it. Next thing they want to do is start adding more gpus per graphics card so 4 gpus on 1 card.
Yeah, well AMD tried that with 7990 if I remember correctly, but the memory from the second chip was literally useless. The only thing that scaled was the frequency, but it wasn't a double scale, it was 50-40%+ scale, which meant that the huge price wasn't worth it AT ALL considering that the end result of a GPU with 2 chips was performing, in the best conditions with the best optimization, like a graphics card and a half...practically:
1 * 7990 = 1.5 * 7970 in performance in the best conditions... Real life probably lower...
I do not belive theynplan to run sli i think it is ment be like a quad core cpu but a gpu so more then ome gpu per die not per card my bad
Oh ok, that is something else. I think until they get on that level they still have to make use of that huge x16 3.0 pciE bandwith. The VEGA platform seems to make use of the large bandwidth a little more but the alpha drivers seem to need a lot of work before going public. I hope AMD will not make the same mistake it always does...with the drivers I mean.
If i read it right they are pretty much saying that they can't do much more with 1 gpu on a single core so kinda guess where cpus where at when we got the first dual core
I did a rig with 2 Nvidias for LTC mining. And a poor choice for PSU, it burned after 4 months of mining. If you want to do an SLI setup go for a high power source.
well clearly I didn't know what I was doing... But I felt like it would be an interesting story to share, especially if there is someone who thinks about an SLI/Crossfire setup.
Good, knowledge sharing is good. Just add power to the power leachers
I keep hearing SLI has lots of issues. Too bad you had to find out the hard way. Keep on gaming, bro!
Yeah, the problem is with SLI is not only software related...it's also how much time devs spend on optimising a certain game for sli/crossfire... and that time is not a lot.
good technology