- Question about a 2nd video card
- Posted by Amit Roy on January 31st, 2008
Last year I made my first attempt at building a computer. My motherboard is
an ASUS M2N32SLI - Premium Vista Edition. It has 2 x PCIe slots. Back
then I had no idea between nVIDIA and ATI chipsets and I put in an ATI x1650
Pro video card, which was on sale. Now I know I should have put in an SLI
card because it would have allowed me to put in a second card and double
bump the GPU performance. Which brings me to my question: If I put in
another ATI X1650 Pro card in my second PCIe slot will it do anything?
Since I have 2 PCIe slots can I use Crossfire with a second X1650 card? The
card is Crossfire compatible but my motherboard saying nothing about it.
Thanks!
Amit
- Posted by Paul on February 1st, 2008
Amit Roy wrote:
Do you see any Nvidia chipsets in this list of Crossfire ready
motherboards ? (No)
http://ati.amd.com/technology/crossf...dyourown1.html
And buying another X1650 Pro would be a waste of money anyway.
There are nicer GPUs now, at reasonable prices, and you'd only
need one of them. By using a geometry shrink, the power consumption
drops, and you get more for your money.
Sell your existing X1650 Pro and make a new plan.
Paul
- Posted by flambe on February 1st, 2008
SLI and Crossfire at most add about 20% in performance: they are very
overhyped compared to the cost of adding a second high end video card.
Nvidia is now peddling a chipset that can take 3 video cards at a time. I'm
sure somebody will buy into it. The real world performance boost from two
video cards is negligible if you are already running a high end video card,
particularly an Nvidia 8800. You are better off, if 3d gaming is important
to you, just buying one of these cards. SLI can cause problems with some
non-gaming computer tasks and does not work properly with all video games.
If you are not heavily into 3d games it is pointless to buy a high end video
card at all unless you have cash burning a hole in your pocket.
By the way, in real world terms, the ATI 1650 is a very good video card. If
you go for the Nvidia 8800, or even the new hi end ATI card (the model
number escapes me) which most tests show is neglibly "slower" than the 8800,
you are not going to be overwhelmed by the differences although they are not
hard to distinguish.
