SLI motherboards....

[Trogdor]

Let's get one thing straight, I am an ATI fan boy and will always love the little (Or in some cases big) red demons that power my video games. However, recently I have come into possession of multiple XFX 8800GTS 640MB cards and have decided to give Nvidia another go rather than buying the 2900's I wanted for DX10 support (Crysis here I come!)

So my question is this (Well I guess it's multiple questions but anyways), who here uses SLI and what motherboards are you using? How would you rate them?

I'm an Intel owner atm so I would prefer to have Core 2/quad core motherboards suggested (Used to be an AMD fanboy until Whipped their butt )

Basically i'm after features, features, features, money isn't really an issue and it's going to be hard to beat my current ASUS deluxe motherboard.

So what do you guys recommend?

[Thoran]

SLI is a cool toy... but it's really more about making as much money as possible from folks willing to spend it. I played with it years ago when it first became available for consumer PCs, but found that you spent a ton of money on boards that would be slower than a single card within a month or two.

Good choice on the 8800gts though... Toms Hardware just did DX10 benchmarking and even single board 8800 solutions are at least 35% faster than the fastest ATI boards at this point. The 8800GTS (which is the slowest 8800), is still significantly faster than the HD2900XT. Pretty impressive chipset the 8800.

[Trogdor]

Well I decided to try out the GTS and see if there was in improvement over my X1950XTX... There is no doubt that the cards performance is slightly better, but the visual quality just isn't up to par

I ran the UT3 Demo and it loaded a bit quicker and had less lag in heavy fighting, but it didn't look anywhere near as polished or smooth. I dunno, maybe its just because its a Beta demo or something, as WoW certainly runs better.

Who knows, i guess ill have to play around and tweak before its better completely?

[Thoran]

Yea... something definitely not right... the 1950 isn't even a DX10 board, there's no way it will compare visually to the 8800 running DX10 games (check out the online screenshots compared to your system and it might help you figure out what's not working right). Running DX9, visual quality will depend on settings, but the hottest 1950 made (xtx) is anywhere from 40% to 80% the speed of a single 8800 GTS running DX9 apps. (depending on your app/resolution, etc), which will allow to ramp up the quality settings farther before you see significant frame rate degradation. I can run bioshock with maxed settings on my 8800 at 1920 x 1200 with great framerates and console crushing visual quality.

Check all the usual culprets... drivers, quality settings, game settings, etc.

[Trogdor]

Drivers were a nightmare to install on Vista, it just didn't want to be anything more than a "Generic VGA Card" but I forced it to use the drivers and it sorted itself out.

I ahve been into the console games too much to have any PC games that really test my hardware so its hard to make a decent comparison, but so far the Crossfire set-up I had was better (Expected as two 1950's in crossfire still beat the single GTS) maybe once I get my hands on some DX10 games and get the GTS's in SLI it might make an improvement....

But i'm after visual quality, and so far its not living up to the hype!

And yes I have used things like ntune or whatever its called to force high quality settings...

Any suggestions?

[Ziroc]

I have one of the most popular boards that tweakers/OC'ers use--its older now, but was the best a few months ago:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813188009

This one is bad ass now:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...2bUT%2bP35-T2R
Has great cooling, and you can OC so easy.

I wouldn't worry about SLI really. Price vs performance isn't worth it. And you'd need a killer thermal solution.

[Trogdor]

Yeah, normally I would just go for a single top of the range card, but the 8800's almost literally fell into my lap so I might as well use em

Thanks for the links Z, the one you ahve is nice, and I have always loved the DFI boards i used in the past, but didn't even think to look at them now.

I'll check it out!