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2 Video Cards
Hello everyone i have had this question for a while and am finaly going to ask it.
What advantages can you get from using 2 Video Cards? besides the ability to have a two monitor system
"Emotion, yet peace.
Ignorance, yet knowledge.
Passion, yet serenity.
Chaos, yet harmony.
Death, yet the Force"
The Original Jedi Code
Comments
Well, you can run them in Crossfire / SLI if the rest of your hardware supports it, for a minor improvement in performance.
Generally multi-GPU setups are either for a single very high resolution monitor, or for multiple monitors.
Then, of course, there are the people who enjoy paying $500 for an extra 5 fps.
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It depends on the two cards. If you are strapping two nVidia 8600's together, the performance increase is there, but negligible to paying the same for a higher level card, like an 88 or an ATi 4870, unless you already have an SLI or Crossfire card. For any games out there, unless you are running ten things at once, one good card is all you need to enjoy the best performance.
As posters above mentioned, the idea behind 2 card setup is to gain performance - in theory up to 95% more. In reality the gain is much smaller, and the catch is - the game engine should support 2 cards setup,, otherwise you may not see even a 1 fps difference (I believe hat was the case of Crysis once it got released. Probably patched by now). The gfx card drivers do not handle multicarding (?) very well.
this. sli/crossfire is just a marketing ploy.
this. sli/crossfire is just a marketing ploy.
No, it's just another step along that long road that 3dFX started so many years ago with the Voodoo cards. Now we have all but come full circle with the GX2 cards and beyond having multi-GPU's on a single card.
In one of my systems I had an 8800GT, 3dmark06 got me about 13000 added a second overclocked the CPU a bit as not to get a bottleneck and Voila now scores 18000. Which is better than a similar system with a better card for a fraction of the cost. This can be measured in the game I play by giving up and over a 50
% increase in FPS. All depends on the games you play.
Depends on the cards and the games...some games that are really graphic intensive and make the cards work hard (like Crysis) don't give much bonus. And high resolution is usually dependent on a lot of memory.
You can get anywhere from a 5%-70% increase on performance. Even dual 8800GT's are better than any single card out there other than the 4870x2 which is 2 cards in 1....On average, say if you're playing Warhammer with a 4850 at 40 FPS, you'll end up with 70 FPS if you were to use Crossfire.
And its also heavily motherboard depended...some people will use like an old 680i chipset, then go dual 8800's and wonder why they hardly get a gain. You'll need a solid and expensive board if you want to get the full benefits from multi-gpu's.
if i wanted to run a two monitor setup and be able to play WoW on one monitor and say be on thottbot on another what all would i have to buy? right now i have an 8600GT nVidia and a 22'' Acer monitor what else would i need?
"Emotion, yet peace.
Ignorance, yet knowledge.
Passion, yet serenity.
Chaos, yet harmony.
Death, yet the Force"
The Original Jedi Code
here's a good post comparing a 4870 and a 4870x2
www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php
There are few/no advantages to using 2 cards. Mostly because it only helps if it's supported by the drivers, simply upgrade to a better card, don't buy a second. You can run two monitors on one card most of the time, unless you buy quite a small one. Otherwise, the only advantage is a slight performance increase and the ability for tri and quad monitors setups. It's definitely not worth the cash.
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