Why Is The Nvedia Sli Tech Better

[vblk 0]

Can Anybody please tell me why the new ( i think) Nvedia SLi technology graphics cards are better? Also I s AMD really better than Intel when it comes to Gaming?

[Razor 0]

im sure Sli technology means that you can actually have more than one graphics card connected to each other..i know sombody that has two Geforce 7200 in the one machine....and are connected by a little chip that goes across like a bridge..it basically means your 1 card has the power of two because it is two cards linked..if you know what i mean

[wansuen 0]

Well yeah the SLi lets you link two cards together.... honestly I didn't know that there were geforces 7200 that were out because the 7300 GS seem to be the "budget" card for the 7 series and if you meant 6200, I'm not even sure the 6200 comes in PCI Express (SLi is only for PCI Express cards). But the performance advantage of getting a SLi rig setup may not be as good as it seems. If you look at the benchmarks, it isn't like have two cards is going to double the performance. To me the improvements do not justify the increased cost of having to purchase two video cards.The best use of having SLi in my opinion is so that maybe in the future when you think your SLi capable video card is a little on the slow side you can purchase a similar card (I don't think they have to be entirely identical, but probably from the same line of video cards would be best, like if you original card was a 7800 GT, u would want the second card to also be a 7800GT) so that by the time you buy the second card it will be quite a bit cheaper than when you originally bought it and you get the performance increase without having to pay for an entirely new, much more expensive card.As far as the AMD thing, you could probably google it and get a better answer than what I have to say because I honestly don't know that much. But basically if you have like an AMD althon 64 2800+ cpu and compare it to an identical machine with an Intel Pentium 4 2.8, with game the AMD chip will almost always outperform in games. But I really think that the difference is minimal and probably other factors would matter more when you decide to choose a cpu such as the cost for the performance, which AMD actually is better for the most part.Just as a note ATI also has a similar technology to SLi that's called the crossfire I believe, I'm not sure if one functions better than the other, but the idea is the same with using more than one video card in a rig to improve the performance by spreading the work load between the two cards.

[adriantc 0]

Well as far as I know nvidia's SLI is better then ATI's solution ... Crossfire. At least on the leatest motherboards for one reason... Crossfire spits the 16x PCI-e into 2 8x PCI-e, while the second generation of SLI makes both video cards work at 16x improving the speed with ~2% (which is very liitle in my opinion). It is also known that AMD is much beter for gaming, while Intel is better for office software. Not to mention then fact that AMD is cheaper...

[malish 0]

The answer is simple - if you compare to ATi, it simply has worse graphics cards than NVidia plus their crossfire is no so advanced as invidia's SLi. To tell the truth, after using crossfire... I came to conclusion that its a lot cheaper and faster to get one decent 7800GT or GTX from Nvidia than spend 2 x $350 for some x850xx which guarantee no speed increase.

Edited February 14, 2006 by malish (see edit history)

[stlgoalie 0]

AMd is better for gaming******Only if running AMD64 chips on Windows XP-64 edition and the game your playing is coded to take advantage of 64-bit processing technology.Of dealing with 64-bit processors for over a decade, more 99% of computer tasks 32-bit chips are actually going to be faster. Especially for your average office application. The only industries that can take advantage of 64-bit are games and graphics rendering and even then only if the software is coded for 64-bit applications. I can remember trying to run some of our CAD software on a 64-bit Ultra-Sparc workstation. The 32-bit Sparc station was killing it in operating performance. Now when it came time to number crunch, say airflow/particle simulatons, the UltraSparcs would win hands down, but in the actual modelling and using the program we went back to 32-bit Sparc machines for our workstations.

[Cool_Freaker 0]

AMd is better for gaming******Only if running AMD64 chips on Windows XP-64 edition and the game your playing is coded to take advantage of 64-bit processing technology.

Of dealing with 64-bit processors for over a decade, more 99% of computer tasks 32-bit chips are actually going to be faster. Especially for your average office application. The only industries that can take advantage of 64-bit are games and graphics rendering and even then only if the software is coded for 64-bit applications.

It's more for the price performance ratio you get with AMD, and with gaming it works just as well as an Intel. Intel, with its Hyperthreading is much better for jobs like video editing, though with Dual Cores, you're better off with an AMD it seems. There isn't really all that much software specifically for 64bit technology yet.

SLi just allows you to have two graphics cards sharing the workload. ATi's Crossfire has a little more flexibility with needing only one card to be Crossfire enabled - and I don't think you need the same card. However, there is little point getting a card better or worse than the one you have in there already, as it will bottleneck with the lower performing card. My friend said SLi was done with one card producing one half of the screen, with the other producing the other half, whilst Crossfire was done with each card producing alternating lines of pixels on the screen. I don't know how true that is though.

[PDG 0]

Actually I prefer Intel prossesor.

[wansuen 0]

Actually I prefer Intel prossesor.

What does that have to do with SLi? Are to referring to intel integrated graphic chips? heh cuz I don't see how you could ever prefer that over any half decent nvidia or ATI card... and I don't think there are any mobos that have two integrated GPUs on it.

[awild 0]

SLI technology used identic graphic card..so, look like RAID.. the preformance better than ATI crossfire..

[member_leaving 0]

OK, Let me clarify for all of you. SLI stands for scaleable link interface. it allows you to use two nvidia geforce graphics cards together. all of you pretty much hit the nail on the head with that one. where you got it wrong is the part where you say that the cards have to be exactly the same or that they even have to be from the same line. with the new geforce 80 driver there is much more flexibility with using cards. Another thing is the new upgrade curve. Lets say you go out and buy one card say a 7200. then later you want to upgrade to a 7800. it has been proven that 2 7200's outperform one 7800, and by the time you want to upgrade, the 7200's will be cheaper. the problem lies if you want to upgrade again, you would either have to buy 2 new 7800's or go with the new (hypothetical) 8000 to get the boost past your 7200's. by the time you want to upgrade the price may have gone down and you can throw those two 7200's in another computer, give them to a friend, or sell them. The point is you now have two old cards instead of one. it would be possible to buy the 800 and put it in SLI with the 7200 but the 800 would perform at the same speed as the 7200 so you would basically be paying extra for a 7200 card, not a 8000 card. Another mistake that is commonly made is that people seem to think that ATI's crossfire is better because they used to be the leader. think about it. Nvidia's SLI has been out over a year longer than ATI's crossfire and is therefore more accepted by developers and system connections. for gamming the sli may be slightly more expensive but it is worht the cost. you can get most information off of sites like Tom's Hardware and other places liek that, you can also find some good information on Nvidia's own website. another way to tell what is better is to look at what is being used in the dell XPS systems, they use Nvidia SLI and I beleive they use AMD's FX series, at least they did last time I checked.