Multiple graphics cards.

[Ptholli14]

How would I add multiple gpu’s to a computer(first time builder.) I tried looking it up but no answers.

[Mira Yurizaki]

37 minutes ago, Ptholli14 said:

How would I add multiple gpu’s to a computer(first time builder.) I tried looking it up but no answers.

If you're doing this to use NVIDIA SLI or AMD Crossfire, there's a laundry list of requirements:

• Requirements for either:
  • You need at least two PCI Express x16 slots.
  • You need to have a power supply that can handle the additional card. Typically a single video card system should have a 500W PSU. Adding another card bumps this up to 700W. But I recommend something in the 750W-800W range.
  • The GPUs needs to be the same make and model (e.g. NVIDIA GeForce 1080, AMD Radeon RX 580). It doesn't have to be from same AIB manufacturer though, so you can mix an ASUS card with an MSI card, provided they're the same GPU.
• Requirements for SLI:
  • Your motherboard needs to have a chipset that supports it. Intel's Z or X series chipsets (e.g., Z370, X299) or AMD's X370 work.
  • It must be a graphics card that also supports SLI. The GeForce 10 series only supports SLI for GTX 1070 or better. Previously most of the GPUs  worked.
  • The PCI Express slot needs to have at least 8 lanes (This isn't something you normally worry about)
• Requirements for CrossFire:
  • Like SLI, the motherboard needs a chipset that supports it. Unlike SLI, CrossFire works with more chipsets. At the moment this appears to be Intel's higher end H series (e.g., H170), Z, and X series, or AMD X300 or X370.
  • Also unlike SLI, AMD does not have a restriction on which GPU you can use.
  • The PCI Express slot needs to have at least 4 lanes
• Other Notes:
  • If you're unsure if your motherboard supports SLI or CrossFire, consult your manual. It'll say.

If you're not doing SLI or CrossFire, you can just install any other graphics card in your PC provided you have another PCI Express x16 slot.

[General Winter]

honestly, don't do this (if you're intending to do this for gaming)

 

there is very little support for multiple GPUs in most games

[Froody129]

For games only SLI or Xfire works for both at the same time . If you’re rendering of mining or something it’ll work fine

[Frankenburger]

1 hour ago, General Winter said:

there is very little support for multiple GPUs in most games

That is incorrect.

 

https://babeltechreviews.com/the-50-game-gtx-1070-ti-sli-review/3/

 

eighty percent of our 50 games – 40 games – generally scale positively with SLI and most of them give solid performance increases depending on the resolution. 4K often sees the most benefit where it is mostly needed.

[Mick Naughty]

Depends on the hardware and intended use. 

 

I put the card in the pci slot and continue to do so until the slots are filled. Pretty simple. 

[General Winter]

13 hours ago, Frankenburger said:

That is incorrect.

 

https://babeltechreviews.com/the-50-game-gtx-1070-ti-sli-review/3/

 

 

no, it is correct, you'd be better off OC a 1080ti (water cooled for the price of 2 1070ti) and you'll get better performance for less power consumption and on top of that the SLI trend died a while ago, doing multiple cards is stupid compared to using one better card

 

Quote

SLI scaling is good performance-wise in mostly older games and where the devs specifically support SLI in newer DX11 and in DX12 games.

 

[Frankenburger]

17 minutes ago, General Winter said:

no, it is correct, you'd be better off OC a 1080ti (water cooled for the price of 2 1070ti) and you'll get better performance for less power consumption and on top of that the SLI trend died a while ago, doing multiple cards is stupid compared to using one better card

 

 

First off, I'm not saying that SLI has a good value proposition, so get that thought out of your head. The point of my post is to outline that SLI is still viable to those who have disposable income to spend on an enthusiast level system.

 

In 2017, out of 18 games tested, only 5 either failed to scale or scaled negatively. With the exception of 2 games, 11 games had at least 50% scaling, and 5 had over 80% scaling. Keep in mind, this is without manual fixes.

 

This means that statistically speaking, in 2017, 27% of games won't work with SLI, and 61% of games will yield a 50% improvement or greater.

 

If you look at SLI as an all encompassing statistic, in the last few years, only 1 out of 5 games won't scale, and less than 2 out of 5 games have less than 50% scaling. Again, this is without manual fixes.

 

So tell me, how exactly is SLI dying?

[Mick Naughty]

Meh, I’d rather take my old titans in bf1 and have flawless performance over a 1080ti and have constant stutter from a weak cpu. Even if a cpu wasn’t the issue, lower frame times would win me over, I’ll stick to sli until strong cards come out. 

[General Winter]

1 hour ago, Frankenburger said:

First off, I'm not saying that SLI has a good value proposition, so get that thought out of your head. The point of my post is to outline that SLI is still viable to those who have disposable income to spend on an enthusiast level system.

 

In 2017, out of 18 games tested, only 5 either failed to scale or scaled negatively. With the exception of 2 games, 11 games had at least 50% scaling, and 5 had over 80% scaling. Keep in mind, this is without manual fixes.

 

This means that statistically speaking, in 2017, 27% of games won't work with SLI, and 61% of games will yield a 50% improvement or greater.

 

If you look at SLI as an all encompassing statistic, in the last few years, only 1 out of 5 games won't scale, and less than 2 out of 5 games have less than 50% scaling. Again, this is without manual fixes.

 

So tell me, how exactly is SLI dying?

i never said it was dying  or that it was completely impossible, i was saying its a waste of money (like those stupid insane quad titan XP builds from 2014 that were like $10K on ebay)

 

you say things i don't say and get mad, i'm point out that its impractical even though it will technically be better than 1 of the exact same card for most games, the games themselves don't support them enough to where you'll be getting double the FPS or graphical capability, rather 1.5X on average is going to be your best bet

 

if you so happen to have identical GPU's laying around for whatever reason then sure go burn your power bill to play games 1.5X as good as you were before instead of doing the rational thing and getting a 1080ti (which runs nearly twice as good and burns less energy than two 1070tis)

 

http://www.gamersnexus.net/guides/2246-gtx-970-sli-vs-gtx-980-ti

 

 

and if you do have money to burn  why not get dual/quad 1080ti's? there is a reason the majority of people don't run SLI despite technically giving better performance, you can do the same thing with one better card and not have to worry about MOBO supporting multiple GPU'S, space if you have a mini or mirco build, etc.

 

 

 

you can keep saying its "technically" possible but the reality is for the majority is that its impractical and doesn't yield expected results(like double the power and works on 100% of games) across the board and as a result lost popularity and pretty much died

 

https://www.fudzilla.com/news/graphics/38134-crossfire-and-sli-market-is-just-300-000-units

 

 

also SLI suffers a lot more in performance and reliability once you use more than two cards anyway

 

https://www.reddit.com/r/pcgaming/comments/4na814/nvidia_will_no_longer_support_3way_and_4way_sli/

 

[Frankenburger]

34 minutes ago, General Winter said:

i never said it was dying  or that it was completely impossible

 

you say things i don't say and get mad

You said "the SLI trend is dead". Your words, not mine.

Saying "the SLI trend is dead" is fundamentally no different than saying "SLI is dying".

 

34 minutes ago, General Winter said:

the games themselves don't support them enough to where you'll be getting double the FPS or graphical capability, rather 1.5X on average is going to be your best bet

Nobody said anything about doubling performance. However, if you stop being so hasty to make assumptions and take the time to examine the facts established by benchmarking 50 games, you would realize your best bet is going to be 85% scaling, not 50%.

 

Also, some games have been noted to have 90%+ scaling, such as Sleeping Dogs, Dying Light, Gears of War 4, and For Honor.

[AngeleJR]

Personally, I love my GTX 1080 SLI with PG278Q build. It's just some games, microstuttering is introduced and it's annoying. Turning SLI off works great and I get the fluidity of the game back. But I didn't spend $450 on a GTX 1080 just for it to be turned off, y'know? 

[General Winter]

56 minutes ago, Frankenburger said:

You said "the SLI trend is dead". Your words, not mine.

Saying "the SLI trend is dead" is fundamentally no different than saying "SLI is dying".

 

quote me on that, you can't cause i never said that

 

17 hours ago, General Winter said:

honestly, don't do this (if you're intending to do this for gaming)

 

there is very little support for multiple GPUs in most games

this is what i said and i still stand by it, i shared numerous sources explaining the flaws and reasons for lack of support and how nvidia themselves are no longer supporting 3 and 4 way SLI

 

you can act like you will, but you literally didn't even look at or responded to any of my claims or sources other than your own as reference to the actual scaling[only for dual SLI] (which i was generalizing since in practice it varies game by game and i was saying 50% since it averages out there with the highs being near 100 and the lows not working at all)

 

 

 

[AngeleJR]

4 minutes ago, General Winter said:

quote me on that, you can't cause i never said that

 

this is what i said and i still stand by it, i shared numerous sources explaining the flaws and reasons for lack of support and how nvidia themselves are no longer supporting 3 and 4 way SLI

 

you can act like you will, but you literally didn't even look at or responded to any of my claims or sources other than your own as reference to the actual scaling[only for dual SLI] (which i was generalizing since in practice it varies game by game and i was saying 50% since it averages out there with the highs being near 100 and the lows not working at all)

 

 

 

Well there are some way to work around 3 & 4 way SLI. I mean this guy did with his 4-way Titan X SLI lol: 

 

[Frankenburger]

12 minutes ago, General Winter said:

quote me on that, you can't cause i never said that

 

12 minutes ago, General Winter said:

i was saying 50% since it averages out there with the highs being near 100 and the lows not working at all

Which is it? Does SLI average 50% scaling? Or is 50% scaling the best you could hope for?

 

"Averages" and "best" are two distinctly different things.

[General Winter]

13 minutes ago, AngeleJR said:

Well there are some way to work around 3 & 4 way SLI. I mean this guy did with his 4-way Titan X SLI lol: 

 

https://www.reddit.com/r/pcgaming/comments/4na814/nvidia_will_no_longer_support_3way_and_4way_sli/

 

for the 10xx series to be exact, which are gaming/consumer card; nvidia said since the 1080ti exist as the gaming powerhouse than the titan line up will be more akin to the quadros in that they're better suited for work performance rather than just gaming

 

 

of course you can still game with quadros and/or titans (linus did a 16k video a while ago which needed the extra vram of the quadros in order to have any success)

 

 

 

[General Winter]

14 minutes ago, Frankenburger said:

 

Which is it? Does SLI average 50% scaling? Or is 50% scaling the best you could hope for?

 

"Averages" and "best" are two distinctly different things.

1. you clearly can't read "SLI trend died a while ago" , you know what else died a while ago as well, the newgrounds trend or the pokemon go trend, that doesn't mean they're dead, but that just means it isn't as popular as it was before (hence the word trend, please tell me you can use a dictionary) , i meant the same about SLI but you use your questionable reading comprehension skills as you will, i can't argue with that

 

2. unless you can literally test all games for compatibility in the last 5 years for scaling performance, 50% is a very solid rough estimate of scaling, which isn't ideal for anyone with half a brain cell who knew they could get more with one card; if you told someone who never heard of SLI and said you use double the graphics cards and their guess isn't double the power immediately without any foreknowledge, then they're a special kind of person. Almost everyone was expecting double scaling/performance boost when SLI came out, but it reality it varied from game to game vs. one consistent card which does have double the power and you don't have to worry how much a game does or doesn't scale

 

[Frankenburger]

3 minutes ago, General Winter said:

*snip*

 

You just literally backpedaled on everything you said earlier. GG

[General Winter]

2 minutes ago, Frankenburger said:

You just literally backpedaled on everything you said earlier. GG

i didn't if you could understand what i write

 

i can recommend some online ELA course if you want to improve your reading comprehension skills, i know i write too much and your lack of argument shows that what i wrote could've been written at a 5th grader level, but i'd rather you improve yourself before you talk to me again

[Frankenburger]

2 hours ago, General Winter said:

i didn't if you could understand what i write

I did understand what you wrote. Problem is you're trying to retroactively claim false equivalence.

 

1. You claim the SLI trend is dead. This would mean that game devs and Nvidia is no longer supporting SLI, ala, SLI is dying. However, this is far from the truth. The state of SLI continues to improve, which can be verified through patch notes. Thus, the SLI trend continues. ( Trend - Noun - a general direction in which something is developing or changing.)
2. You first claimed "50% scaling is the best you can hope for", then later you tried to claim that you meant "50% is what you'll gain on average". Not once did you say "on average" until after I called your fallacy. I will repeat myself, there is a difference between net gain and best case scenario. Yes, SLI's aggregate scaling is approximately 50% if you count the 1 out of 5 games that don't scale. However, the best you can hope for is 85% or higher, which is in direct contrast to your earlier claims.