Can I use NVidia card on motherboard that support only Crossfire?

VinZie · February 21, 2016

Just now, fantysak said:

It isnt bad card but i have some money to upgrade so why not?

You can try. If you wanna upgrade and wanna go SLI get a different Mobo

LokiFire · February 21, 2016

42 minutes ago, VinZie said:

I quote from SirMaster on Reddit. https://www.reddit.com/r/buildapc/comments/zk1qd/how_much_does_sli_improve_performance/

"SLi can provide up to 100% benefit in the best cases.

In most situations it's around 50-90% improvement.

SLi does have a few problems though and it can actually provide worse performance compared to a single card in a few cases.

SLi takes additional CPU overheard to operate so in games where you are CPU limited you can actually see lower performance than a single card.

For me this was a problem in BF3 (64 player servers) and GW2 (WvW). I have an i7 overclocked to 4.3GHz but in BF3 in 64 player battles with a single GTX 480 I was getting ~60fps minimums on High settings. When I added a second GTX 480 in SLi I found that I now only got 45-50FPS minimums in the intense situations.

I was able to however increase to Ultra settings and that didn't lower my performance at all compared to high.

Similarly in GW2 in WvW with one 480 I was getting 30fps in the big battles, with a second 480 I was only getting about 20fps.

I decided to ditch the 2 480s for a single 680 and my performance has actually been better overall even though 2 480s are a bit more powerful.

My FPS is a lot more stable and I have higher minimums with the single 680 which is hat matters more to me and to provide fluid game-play. the only thing the SLi 480s were better at was benchmarks.

Finally, SLi can sometimes have micro stuttering which is an inherent effect of trying to synchronize 2 GPUs. Micro stuttering is caused the fluctuation in frame latency time between frames when each GPU has a different difficulty of frame. It happens in AFR SLi mode where the GPUs are rendering each alternating frame. Most games use AFR mode.

The micro-stuttering does bug me enough that's for me its worth it to just stick with a single card now.

For my history I used to have 7900 GTX SLi, then 8800 GTS 512 SLi, then GTX 480 SLi. So I do have my fair experience with the SLi technology.

I love my GTX 680 now and I think ill be sticking with a single card from now on.

The only reason I'd go back to SLi is to power something like a triple monitor setup where 1 card just simply isn't enough power for high framerates."