SLI on old generations

NTMBK

Lifer
Nov 14, 2011
10,208
4,940
136
A friend of mine still uses a 9600GT as his main graphics card, but he's thinking of getting an upgrade. Would it be worthwhile for him to grab a second one cheap off eBay and going SLI? Do old generations in SLI still tend to get decent performance in modern games?
 

Maximilian

Lifer
Feb 8, 2004
12,603
9
81
Nah i wouldnt bother tbh. SLI is only good if you need more performance than the current most powerful single card can offer. Its usually always better to just get a newer generation single card than to SLI two old cards. 9600 is pretty old now anyways, time to junk it and upgrade.
 

VirtualLarry

No Lifer
Aug 25, 2001
56,230
9,990
126
Slow X2 is still slow. Get a newer card.

Edit:
PS. Isn't a 9600GT still slower than an FM2 Trinity A10 APU, when paired with faster DDR3 RAM?
 

lehtv

Elite Member
Dec 8, 2010
11,900
74
91
Rather sell the 9600gt and upgrade to 7770 or 650 ti assuming the CPU won't bottleneck
 

MrK6

Diamond Member
Aug 9, 2004
4,458
4
81
A friend of mine still uses a 9600GT as his main graphics card, but he's thinking of getting an upgrade. Would it be worthwhile for him to grab a second one cheap off eBay and going SLI? Do old generations in SLI still tend to get decent performance in modern games?
Depends on what you mean by "modern games." If you're buying off eBay, just grab a GTX 260 or 4850 for $20-30 and that will be twice as fast anyway. If you have a bigger budget, go higher. Multi-GPU is never a good idea as long as there's a comparable single GPU solution.
 

FalseChristian

Diamond Member
Jan 7, 2002
3,322
0
71
Just to let you know that an 'old' GTX 460 1GB is 3x faster than an 9800GT which is 70% faster than a 9600GT. Go with at least 2 9800/8800GT SLI. He'll be rather unhappy with 2 9600GT SLI (than again, who wouldn't be!).