Is SLI worth it?

OL1139

Member
Hello, ive been unsure on whether SLI is worth the extra cost. Ive read many articles on it but im still not sure as to whether the boost is enough to warrant the extra cost. Help pls. Yo Oussebon help me out bro.
 

steaky360

Moderator
Moderator
The general consensus tends to be if you're running a high resolution display (i.e. 4k) and want a higher framerate then certainly for some games it can be worth it (whether it actually is worth it includes whether you think its worth it financially, so its not something I can say). Obviously it depends on the card too, not sure if there's much out there to obviously compare say two 1060s to one 1080 or anything like that but I'm sure there will be.

I'd imagine the scoop is the same as its always been, in the first instance, you should get the single most powerful card you can afford rather than two 'lesser cards'. That way you can always 'upgrade' to a second of the more powerful card in the future should you have to.

I'm just running a single 1080 at the moment and have no problems playing anything at 1920x1080 hitting 60FPS+.
 

Scott

Behold The Ford Mondeo
Moderator
Obviously budget is the biggest factor of this. SLI is the last performance gain I would consider. As above, prior to selecting SLI you automatically spend what you can on the best card. If you are looking to buy right now that's the 1080ti, if you wait a couple of months it's likely to be the 1180, a few months later it'll be the 1180ti... etc, etc, etc.

With that sort of GPU power you should be smashing everything at 1080p without even breathing hard. It'll do amazing framerates with sensible settings at 1440p and it will coast most 4k titles at reasonable framerates too. Throwing VR into the mix there isn't a lot that will push this sort of card while keeping the settings reasonable, you can always bring any card to it's knees with silly settings though (Full Shadows, full AA and grass on Project Cars for example).

To consider SLI you need to consider the games you wish to play and the future games relating to their developers. I would think that current titles with good SLI scaling will be from certain devs/project teams that you can bet will continue this trend going forward.

If the games you currently play scale well and you need the extra grunt where a 1080ti won't quite cut the mustard then it's purely down to finances. However, if few of your selected games scale well then there's really no point, unless you are happy to splash the cash :)

My advice would be to build a system capable of SLI, withholding the second card until you decide if you need the power or not :)
 

mishra

Rising Star
SLI was always a struggle. It is a false economy really. Not only some games will not support it, even the ones which should more often crash or behave erratically.
Then you have to add the extra cost for buying second card (locking yourself into an old or ageing tech). On top of that you have extra electric bills to pay. You get twice as much heat in your case and also your noise is doubled from 2 GPU's. It just doesn't really make sense.

Don't get me wrong if you can get a second card dirt cheap or even for free.. aboslutely go for it. But if you are thikning specifically to go down that route.. I would say rethink your options. Sell your old card and upgrade to a better brand new model.
From what we have seen so far every iteration of cards is usually not only more powerfull, use less power but also is quieter... it simply is a win on all fronts.
 

Oussebon

Multiverse Poster
I don't have much to add to what I said here: https://www.pcspecialist.co.uk/foru...e-me-a-monster&p=417464&viewfull=1#post417464

Perhaps given that new graphics cards are on the horizon, GTX 1080 ti SLI isn't a good idea right now. You can either hold off purchasing the system altogether, or go with a single GTX 1080 ti which you could replace with an 1180 ti when that appears in due course, if you decide you want more performance than a single 1080 ti offers.

Make sure the 4k monitor you buy has gsync.
 
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