SLI?

[Tarmacsurfer]

Been out of PC gaming for a long while due to Adulting, however a mate has just handed me the remains of his old gaming rig. I5 2500k, Asus P8P67 pro board with 8gig of ram and an EVGA GTX570 card.

Whilst I'm perfectly comfortable with throwing everything in a box and making it work, I'm totally out of touch with modern(ish) requirements. Mostly looking to be able to do things like max out skyrim + mods, and possibly fallout 4 later. Never bothered with SLI in the past but I was wondering if it is worth it in this case given the limited vram on the gpu and the fact the 570 doesn't seem to be that expensive to pick up second hand.

Currently running a very overclocked Q9450 on a P35-DS3R alongside an HD6850, to give an idea of what I'm moving from.
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I'm immortal. Well, so far.

[Rogue_Shadow]

From my limited experience, what gains you achieve from SLI / CF, you are far better off buying a better single card.
Admittedly this opinion is based on trying SLI a year or so ago & I do look forward to being corrected. (SLI GTX970 )

Performance issues aside, you'll still be looking at higher temperatures, higher power consumption & increased noise from running the two cards. This is a given.
However the "possible" technical issues you may encounter with a two card setup ... microstuttering, scaling problems, rendering errors.
These are extremes, but with a PC there are 1 million things that can and will go wrong
So why not keep it simple.

https://static3.fjcdn.com/comments/Flame+shield+activated+_bf12d23427189818e57abc9dd44da563.jpg

[Tarmacsurfer]

The technicalities don't really bother me, made my current cooling system (water based, pump and rad fan controlled via a USB header on the board) as a one off by cannibalising parts from old kit and making what I didn't have, hence I've a good grasp of construction in terms of heat dissipation and power requirements, mostly interested in how SLI scales these days and more importantly, how well the drivers integrate the two cards.

Went on a Google rampage last night and answered my own question - looks like these cards work extremely well in tandem but I may get choked by the cpu. Need to get off air asap, wonder if I can butcher my old cooling rig to make a graphics loop
____________________
I'm immortal. Well, so far.