can you mix two different brands for SLI?

[rasczak]

one xfx 7900GTX and an asus 7900GTX?

 

[angry hampster]

Should be fine. Any differences in clock speeds will match the higher one down to the lower one.

 

[rasczak]

how cool!

 

[Cookie Monster]

Just make sure the graphic card models are the same. I.e 2 7900GTs, but NOT 7900GTX and 7900GT.

 

[Engineer]

Same for ATI's Crossfire or no?

(OH, and thanks for the answers above).

 

[Cookie Monster]

Crossfire is kind of weird.

When it first launched, there was this whole master card, slave card combination for dual GPU setups (crossfire). ATi did market that they can use different card models, where the master card would downclock (or disable the no of pipelines?) to the weaker secondary card. Also coupled with super tiling, and needing no profiles to run games. This turned out pretty bad.

Now, there is no master/slave card and dongle nonsense but rather present day crossfire works like SLi when it comes to setting them up i.e two identical graphics card e.g 2 HD3870, or 2 X1950pro. The difference is that the ATi cards have 2 crossfire connectors.

 

[Zap]

I've done SLI with two 8800GTS cards. One was a factory clocked PNY and the other a factory overclocked XFX. Worked fine... except for the measly 30% performance gain.

 

[nyker96]

Originally posted by: Zap
I've done SLI with two 8800GTS cards. One was a factory clocked PNY and the other a factory overclocked XFX. Worked fine... except for the measly 30% performance gain.

sigh, that's a bit of waste of second 8800gts, I think it'll be better used on another machine :]

 

[Zap]

Originally posted by: nyker96
sigh, that's a bit of waste of second 8800gts, I think it'll be better used on another machine :]

I agree. Ended up separating the two, and eventually sold both.

 

[DrJeff]

Originally posted by: Zap
I've done SLI with two 8800GTS cards. One was a factory clocked PNY and the other a factory overclocked XFX. Worked fine... except for the measly 30% performance gain.

I was thinking about maybe doing the same with two diff brands of 8800GT. 30% performance gain is sort of disconcerting, however. Should diff brands work in SLI and should a 512mb version of the 8800GT SLI with a 256mb 8800GT? I have never run an SLI setup, but do have Crysis waiting for a worthy machine I am about to build, so knowing my options would be nice.

 

[aka1nas]

Originally posted by: angry hampster
Should be fine. Any differences in clock speeds will match the higher one down to the lower one.

They will retain their individual stock clocks if you run them at default speeds in SLI. If you attempt to overclock them, you will need to set both to the same clock speeds as no utility out at the moment allows you to adjust them separately.