"With issues on nForce4 starting to surface" what do you think Anand is referring to?

[karmadharma]

this quote was in the video card buying guide regarding how it would be unwise to go SLI given these 'issues'. Given that I am running an a8n-sli deluxe with 2x6800gt with no problems whatsoever (save the SI raid wanting to (slowly) rebuild every time XP crashes, which happened only once in over 3 weeks anyways) I am wondering what he meant...

(knock on wood on remaining problem-free obviously)

 

[The Pentium Guy]

Well, currently SLi only works with two of the same cards...

 

[MajorPayne]

Originally posted by: The Pentium Guy
Well, currently SLi only works with two of the same cards...

In addition to this, I have heard that SOME Gforce cards (while having the connection for SLI) do NOT work in SLI, so you have to check the card packaging to make sure.

Then there is the fact that SLI ONLY works for games which have a proven SLI profile pre-programmed from Nvidia, and for other games, that second $500.00 video card is a nice slot-filling paperwieght.

Finally, SLI only helps in certain games anyway. CPU bound games like Doom3 may only show a small difference with it, and even then, only with max AA and anistropic filtering turned up, and on a high (1600x1200+) resolution.

This is why some people have said that SLI makes a good test of whether some folks have more money than sense. I do not personally think this is fair, if I had a lot of cash for upgrades, I might have purchased an SLI rig. I do NOT though, so I stuck with a non-SLI Nforce 4 board, and have been quite happy.

In the end, it is all up to the user, and how much are they willing to gamble with thier money. If you buy 2 video cards for your SLI riug, then you have to buy 2 again (or go back to 1 card) when the next upgrad possibility comes along. For those of use with smaller budgets, getting $1000.00 together for 2 cards is something we would be lucky to pull off once, let alone each time that a new card family is released.

 

[karmadharma]

btw, I don't think I have more money than sense I 'upgrade' (as in, buy a new PC) only once every 3-4 years and I figured that investing the extra money was a way to future-proof my rig a little bit more (since for all I know it would be a lot harder to find a second identical 6800GT in the future). After all my old PC lasted me nearly 5 years before being upgraded (ok, the last year or two I couldn't play nearly any recently released games due to my geforce1 being way too slow or missing in features but I really wanted to wait for PCIe and socket 939).

If some day I decide that SLI is not my cup of tea (which right now it is for the games I'm playing), I can just sell one of my cards (yeah, I'll take a bit of a financial hit compared to what I paid for it, but I would also have gotten quite a bit of use out of it).

 

[MajorPayne]

Originally posted by: karmadharma
btw, I don't think I have more money than sense I 'upgrade' (as in, buy a new PC) only once every 3-4 years and I figured that investing the extra money was a way to future-proof my rig a little bit more (since for all I know it would be a lot harder to find a second identical 6800GT in the future). After all my old PC lasted me nearly 5 years before being upgraded (ok, the last year or two I couldn't play nearly any recently released games due to my geforce1 being way too slow or missing in features but I really wanted to wait for PCIe and socket 939).

If some day I decide that SLI is not my cup of tea (which right now it is for the games I'm playing), I can just sell one of my cards (yeah, I'll take a bit of a financial hit compared to what I paid for it, but I would also have gotten quite a bit of use out of it).

I did not say that you have more money than sense, I said that other people on the forums have said this about SLI buyers, and I do not neccessarily agree with it. If my financial situation was different right now, I might well own an SLI rig, but I DO think that for those who are slower upgraders, that SLI may not be the way to go. Mainly because of the fact that you are stuck replacing 2 cards instead of one at each upgrade. Personally, I am glad to see the option for true dual GFX cards return (not just dual display systems, but 2 cards running 1 display). It allows for even more interesting PC configurations, and that is never a bad thing (imo).

 

[karmadharma]

well, if two generations from now one card will be a lot faster than my two cards (quite likely) I might just go for a non-SLI configuration instead: just because one chooses SLI now it doesn't mean we're stuck with it forever, if in two years I bought a GeForce 8800, say, I could just keep one of my 6800GTs to drive an extra monitor (without any impact on the main card) and just sell the other.

Going back to my original question, does anybody have any idea about the 'issues' Anand was referring to with that quote?

 

[HannibalTheCannibal]

karmadharma, what kind of 3dmark01, 3dmark03, 3dmark05, pcmark04 scores are you getting with two 6800GT's in SLI?

PLEASE POST as I am considering SLI.

Nice setup BTW.

 

[ChineseDemocracyGNR]

Kristopher Kubicki talks about the issues on the Comments for that article.

 

[karmadharma]

ChineseDemocracyGNR, do you have an URL for those comments? It might be late but I can't seem to find any sort of link to the comments section for the article

Hannibal, can't remember my scores off the top of my head, but I also only have a 3500+ and with 4x512MB sticks (which run at DDR333) my PC won't be the top of the heap for sure: I went SLI because I prefer to run at high resolutions with AA and that's where SLI works well for me.

 

[ChineseDemocracyGNR]

Well, go to the article page:
http://www.anandtech.com/guides/showdoc.aspx?i=2352

right now it says:
33 comment(s) - last comment rastamanphan on Feb 23, 2005 at 12:24 AM

Just click that and it will open the comments for the article. If you can't find it, here you go:
http://www.anandtech.com/talkarticle.aspx?i=2352

 

[ribbon13]

I would take a dual opteron over a SLI system

 

[Icepick]

Originally posted by: karmadharma
Going back to my original question, does anybody have any idea about the 'issues' Anand was referring to with that quote?

This is a quote from Live:
"#5 considering it was hinted that AnandTech were supposed to have published there SLI roundup this week I would guess they have uncovered issues in those creepy underground labs they call home. SLI only works on a few games and if you play an unsupported game you take a performance hit and a huge financial hit considering you played for 2 cards and get less performance then one."

And a follow up from KristopherKubicki
"Live pretty much answered everything for me. nForce4 beware for now."

Doesn't bode well for SLI. Then again, Kristopher didn't mention SLI directly. He referred to the "nForce4" chipset. Seems that Anandtech is running into problems getting the technology to work right for their benchmarks. This will be an interesting article when it finally sees light of day.

 

[MTSteel]

Maybe the K890 is not a bad choice?

 

[karmadharma]

" if you play an unsupported game you take a performance hit"

I don't quite get that, if I play an unsupported game and create a profile so that it runs in 'single-chip' mode (non-SLI) why would it take a performance hit? Agreed on the 'financial' hit in this case obviously.

Also this seems to be a gripe related to SLI in particular, I still don't get why they imply there are issues with nforce4, I've ran most available graphics benchmarks on my rig to test that everything works and I haven't had any issues whatsoever.