Sli with 2 different cards

N

neewhom

Silver Level Poster
Hey! A while ago I read about being able to Sli most modern cards together Like a Nvidia and ATI card in the same machine with alot of knowhow, however I just finished browsing the Nvidia Sli website and it seems to mention using 2 cards ( each of at least 256mb ) to dedicate one to phx.

Now I have 1 evga 480gtx and 1 point of view 260gtx, and according to their print they are viable for this setup.

Anyone have more on this? Precautions/experience or if it's a waste of time? Because ideally I would like to use my older card than get £30 for it
 
Sleinous

Sleinous

Author Level
Yes, but this is not an SLI setup. What this is is, going into "Nvidia Control Panel" over to Physx, an setting the 260GTX as the "Physx card". Then the 480GTX will run as the graphics card and teh other card will handle physics. You can not put an SLI bridge over the two cards as they must be identical, the best you can do is take Physx off the CPU or 480GTX and plonk it onto the 260GTX to handle.
 
N

neewhom

Silver Level Poster
Sorry this is what I meant, I used Sli instead of multicard. So thanks for confirmation, but I'd like to know, is this worthwhile? Will dedicating phx to the 260 bottleneck my phx rendering? I.e is it better to just have the 480 standalone or will I actually benefit from a multicard setup with high-end gaming
 
Sleinous

Sleinous

Author Level
Ati users will benefit if they dont have an nvidia card as otherwise they wouldnt get physx at all. Depends on bandwidth that your motherboard has for both the pciex16 slots, are they both at x16 or is one x16 and 1 x1? Usually its best to let the 480 do it all, but keep that 260 for later when the gtx480 starts to struggle on games u can free its physx duties with your 260
 
N

neewhom

Silver Level Poster
Motherboard ASUS® P6X58D-E: DDR3, USB 3.0, SATA 6.0GB/s, 3-Way SLI
That's the mobo

Thanks for the info , I'll likely do some benchmarking when I get it set up and make some comparisons, main think was confirm the possibility.
 
Sleinous

Sleinous

Author Level
Ye that mobo has full bandwidth for atleast 2 sli'd cards, so it'd be fine. There are some physx benchmarks when using a 2nd nvidia card on the forums somewhere, some results suggest there be no point for time being.
 
Rakk

Rakk

The Awesome
Moderator
I was under the impression that if you have a NVidia card with PhysX, then it was rather pointless to use a second inferior card as the PhysX engine, cos the 260 will do it, but the 480 will do it better - and I think, though I could be wrong, that the PhysX bit is a seperate bit of the card anyway, so using using the 260 as PhysX wouldn't really reduce the load on the 480 and it would do a worse job of it anyway. *

*Note: this could all be horribly wrong and I've just misunderstood it.
 
Meds

Meds

Moderator
Moderator
I hope Gorman reads this thread to confirm things but I'm sure he took an inferior nVidia GPU home to run a dedicated physx along side his GTX480 and it actually reduced the performance of his PC. So to be honest, I don't think it would be worth while.
 
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