SLI bottleneck question

[Barfly_420]

Hi guys and gals, new to the forums and have a (possibly dumb) question; I am building a budget gaming system for my GF's son. I used an older mobo\cpu to save money (A8N-SLI Deluxe\4400+ X2) and managed to get two cheap 8800GTS (320MB) cards. My question is, how badly will these cards get bottle-necked by either the motherboard and or processor?

I realize the PCI-e slots are specification 1.0, and they will be running at 16x\8x, but i'm not clear to whether the early 8 series cards were able to max out that interface or not.

Thanks for any input you can offer,
Barfly_420

 

[toyota]

that's a pretty bad setup for modern gaming. that cpu is certainly on the poky side and will hold back most any newer game on decent settings. and having two 8800gts 320mb cards is a bit silly because you will run out of vram before that setup can even really be utilized.

 

[Barfly_420]

Well, I realize it's not an ideal situation, but given that I am building this mostly from parts i had lying around the house (with the exception of the cards), and I'm on a budget.... I am just going with what I have...

Do you think that the setup will even benefit from having the second card installed and SLI configured?

Perhaps for his birthday, I can talk his mom into springing for an AM2 mobo\cpu\ram setup...

 

[toyota]

Well, I realize it's not an ideal situation, but given that I am building this mostly from parts i had lying around the house (with the exception of the cards), and I'm on a budget.... I am just going with what I have...

Do you think that the setup will even benefit from having the second card installed and SLI configured?

Perhaps for his birthday, I can talk his mom into springing for an AM2 mobo\cpu\ram setup...

well probably in some cases. 320mb is not enough for even one card though so i dont see it helping much. plus if you run a low enough res for the 320mb to not be an issue than that cpu is going to keep things pretty slow anyway. really that second card could actually offer zero improvement in many cases and may even be slower by a bit just due to the cpu overhead.