what will happen if i put 2 8800GTS 640Mb in a p5n-e?

[ss samy]

My friend said that 650i only does 16x in one slot and 8x in the other, so that 8800 cards cannot work in SLI....is that true?

 

[ss samy]

bump

 

[Krenn]

According to the manual, the 650i will run SLI just fine with both boards at x8. I've seen some benchmarks on the difference between the x8/x8 and x16/x16, and the difference is surprisingly small in most cases. For DX10, though - who knows...

If you run the two cards separately (to run 3-4 monitors), one runs at x16 and the other at x8. That's probably what your friend is thinking of.

So two 8800GTS in SLI mode will run fine in the P5N-E, but would run slightly better in a 680i/680i LT motherboard.

 

[MarcVenice]

As far as I'm concerned, current videocards cant use all bandwith provided on pci-e 8x let alone 16x pci-e. So yes you p5n-e will definately work just fine with two 8800's in SLI mode. Look here for the SLI comparison between your board, and boards supporting dual 16x pci-e.

The P5N-E SLI does exceptionally well using two GeForce 8800 GTX cards and the PCIe 8x slots clearly have no impact on performance, at least not a negative one. There is no difference in performance at 1600x1200 between the P5N-E SLI and its bigger 680i SLI brothers.

 

[aka1nas]

There isn't any requirement for the full x16/x16 configuration to allow SLI to function. The worst thing that may happen is that you will lose performance with an x8/x8 setup. Most tests are showing that only with the 8800GTX are we finally seeing a measurable difference from having the lower amount of bandwith and even then it's not much.