Hello everybody, new to the forums....and a fairly new computer enthusiast. Saw the SLi topic and had to chime in. First off, props to the autor, looks like you put in a lot of time researching this, awesome post.
And now to the matter at hand, is SLi/crossfire worth it? To me, yes it is worth it if you buy the right parts. When I was reading the specs on the mobo (a8npremium), I was kinda wondering why you would want an 16x sli board?? Isnt the whole point of running SLi to take FULL advantage of each cards 16x? So once again I wonder why they used such an inferior SLi getup.
Anyway, in my opinion the whole point of sli (other than placing high numbers on 3dmark), is being able to run any game at the absolute highest quality, without breaking the bank on a sweet video card. I recently put together an SLi rig -asus a8n32SLiDeluxe, opty165,2gb hyperx,2xevga6800's,X-Fi. With this getup I literally run ANY game at its max resolution, on the highest quality. My rational for getting SLi rather than "saving" money on a cheaper mobo and getting a better video card, first off my 2 6800's cost me a total of $199 (after mail in rebate), my mobo cost me 190 after shipping, total cost around $400. I dont think I could get a GOOD video card for what it cost me to get both of the video cards and the motherboard. And as for performance, what the graphs didnt show was what the absolute lowest FPS rate was and what was peak, and how much of the time did it spend below a "playable" framerate. So when youre reading that you think 'a single 6800 doesnt perform THAT much worse then it does in SLi' well I got news for you it does it performs A LOT worse, the lowest frame rate for a single card was WELL below half of what it did in SLi. Basically, that means the difference between a playable frame rate and a non playable frame rate. And all the games that were tested, in my opinion, wouldnt even really tax a higher end system. It was kinda funny actually when I was lookin at the numbers, especially for HL2 I actually chuckled, I get higher frame rates with my 6800's. My average frame rate is 121 (when you run the video stress test) on max settings. In css I rarely fall below 100 fps, and thats usually only on maps that are poorly made.
What they really NEED to test SLi and a single GPu is on a game like Oblivion, so far thats the only game that I have that actually taxes my system. I'd really like to see the results for that. I bet on a game like that is where you would notice the biggest difference between SLI and a single card GPU.
At any rate, SLi rocks, its worth the money (to me), not to mention when then DX10 cards come out Im going to buy 2 and be set for a number of years (I hope). DX10 is the only reason I didnt get 7800GTX's.
-P.