Confused about SLI

[BoboKatt]

Hi all.
I recently upgraded to a 7900GT on a nice DFI Lanparty board with my AMD X2 3800+ which runs nicely OC'ed at 2400Mhz. I play mostly older games and Everquest. My question which I am totally lost in is that would getting a second card (another 7900GT in SLI) help AT ALL with games that might be older or, to the best of my knowledge, not have a specific SLI profile written for it?

My system runs games like EQ really well, don't get me wrong.. especially now with 2 GIGs of RAM. However when I run 3 accounts or there are like 60-70 folks in raids and I turn on all the goodies, spell effects etc.. I do notice some slow down. I spoke to a friend recently that upgraded to a new 7950 card with the 1GIG of ram that is essentially an SLI card in a one slot solution. His reasoning was that since he was starting from scratch it was going to be faster and cheaper than getting a 2 7900GT. He swears his EQ and EQ2 and WOW has never been faster... again is it because the card is faster or are these games taking advantage of SLI?

thanks! Bob

 

[darkdemyze]

What kind of monitor are you running? Or better said, what resolution is it?

You may want to read the review of the 7950: http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2769
You would see that 2 7900GT perform just about on par with the 7950. Still, it really depends on what resolution you're running at that will determine if the upgrade is worth it or not.

 

[tuteja1986]

WOW and Ever Quest 1 doesn't need SLI to run it at 1600x1200 all high

EQ2 is another story

I wouldn't get sli unless you played the latest graphic whore games at high res.

I think your slow down problem lies somewhere eles.

 

[BoboKatt]

Yeah it's what I figured... in fact I was actually thinking if I did go SLI I would start getting weird play effects or crashes from EQ, a game that is flaky on a good day

thanks