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To SLI or not to SLI for widescreen gaming... that is the question

T

TheInternal

Senior member
Greetings all,

Been giving some buying advice to a new budget computer buyer, and found myself having to fight the urge to spend more money than I should on upgrades for my own computer.

Currently, my biggest debate is on the graphics front. I'm currently running a 6800 Ultra to power my 1920x1200 Dell 24" widescreen LCD, and it's 15 FPS on Oblivion just isn't cutting it for me. Other vital stats on my current system: socket 939 AMD 64 3500+ with 1 GB Crucial Ballistix DDR 400 RAM on the MSI Neo 4 Platinum SLI motherboard.

Should I buy one 7900 GTX, or would my $500 be better spent on two 7900 GT cards in SLI mode? Would a single 7900 GT suffice for 1920x1200 resolution high detail gaming?
Should I be looking at the ATI options instead?

Any and all comments welcomed. If you happen to have heard of a 15" notebook with decent processor and at least a x1600 or geforce 6600 for near the cost of a new 7900 GTX, lemme know 🙂
 
1) Firstly get atleast 2gb ram.
2) Consider ocing your cpu, not that it is required, most/all games should run at max settings even without any oc. But for games like UT07 and maybe NFS Carbon ocing is recommended.

7900GT SLi>7900GTX
If you want to spend so much money I would suggest that you get Geforce 7950GX 2 instead.

Keep in mind that none of todays cards will manage to play all games at 1920X1200, even 7900GTX SLI won't.

Games like Oblivion need to be played at 1280X1024 with mostly maxed settings, HDR, 16X AF

I would suggest that you lower your res to 1280*1024 or 1600*1200.

Another thing with Nvidia cards is that you can't use HDR+AA and you will surely not like to miss HDR while AA will be almost mandatory with such a big monitor especially for lower resolution.

1)Either play a game at medium or high settings or whatever yor card allows if not the maximum.
2)Else reduce the res and play at max settings, in case you have a difficulty doing tat with tis monitor thensell this off for a 17" or 19" monitor.

Graphic Card:
I would suggest that you get a Radeon 1900XT which is a better buy than a 7900GTX and costs less. 1900XT will start at around 325$ at newegg.com
Get that.
It won't beat a 7900GTX in all games, some games the 7900GTX will be a lot ahead, nor will it beat if you turn iamge quality down, but incase you plan to use AA + HDR then it will help, it will give better image quality, better AF, and less performance hit with AA. Nvidia on the other hand will have bettter AA: Super sampling, not that you will use it anyway, especially at that res.

1900XTX is a tad (5-10% on average) faster than 1900xt and gets a score of about +800 over 1900xt in 3d mark 06. But real world is not much diff.

get 1900XT and enjoy your games.
 
thank you for the reply. I've noticed when I run games at resolutions other than the native ones that they seem to be more artifacted... even with AA turned on. Frankly, I've yet to see much noticable real world difference with AA turned on at lower resolutions in general on an LCD vs. running the program at native resolution without AA... also... I got my widescreen monitor to run movies AND games at widescreen resolutions. 1600x1200 is a standard 3:4 ration 🙁

I'll try to read up on the ATI side. Additional comments/suggestions, especially from fellow widescreen gamers would be greatly welcomed. My 24" widescreen Dell LCD has a native resolution of 1920x1200. I'd LIKE to run games at that resolution. Please lemme know if I've wrongly assumed that is doable at acceptable framerates with high detail settings.
 
I have 2 7900 GT's in SLI and I want to get rid of them for a single 7900 GTX (Or X1900XTX possibly). However I can bet my reasons are the opposite of yours.

1) In SLI mode, you can only use a single monitor. So 7900 GT's = Super Duper Power on a single monitor. The 7900GTX is slower accross the board, but allows me to use 2 monitors which is alot more productive when im working.

2) I dont have the space to put a 2 slot cooler on both my 7900 GT's because I lose 2/3 PCI slots, and I need at least 2 PCI slots for Sound Card + Wireless G card, so I cant quiet my 7900 GT's in my setup with aftermarket coolers.

3) I am aiming for quiet more than performance, and without the option of using 2 aftermarket coolers on my 7900 GT's, the GTX is a much better option. The 7900 GT's are a bit loud usign their stock coolers.


So basically, go 7900 GT's in SLI if, You want the faster option, you dont intend to use 2 monitors (I constantly enable and disable SLI depending on what im doing), and if you have the room for 2 slot coolers on both cards, or dont care about noise as much.
 
I also run dual monitors, but am constantly having to turn off my secondary 19" CRT for Second Life (Second Life takes a 80-90% FPS reduction if you run Windows in multimonitor mode).

I don't have the space issue that you do krotchy. I have 3 PCI slots, two of which are occupied (dual TV tuner card, and Audigy 2 ZS), so I can live with the one less PCI slot that's not being used anywho.

You can only power ONE monitor in SLI mode? I didn't realize that 😵

I've only skimmed through a few reviews of dual GPU cards and hadn't really been impressed. Is the 7950GX2 an exception? Mind linking the article that swayed you into recommending it?
 
Originally posted by: TheInternal
You can only power ONE monitor in SLI mode? I didn't realize that 😵
Click to expand...

Yeah, I wish I had known that beore I bought my 7900 GT's. I was quite shocked to say the least. If your already used to disabling 1 monitor when you game, then disabling/enabling SLI depending on what your doing wont make much of a difference.

 
thanks for that heads up krotchy. More information and suggestions/comments GREATLY appreciated. I love getting different opinions/links to research. If you do suggest a component, an explanation for why would be awesome, or at least a linky please 😉
 
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