Your opinion on SLI vs Dual GPU?

• Mentosftw wrote on 2013-01-31 20:10
  What do you think about the two?
  
  Take the GTX 680 and the GTX 690: The 690 is only two 680 GPUs on the same board.
  
  I'm not quite sure if the 680 would have the advantage in cooling while the 690 has the advantage of using an SLI with another 690 for a quad core connection (why you'd need so much power I have no idea).
  
  Additionally, I'm not sure if both technologies distribute the workload the same way or if one does it better than the other.
• Compass wrote on 2013-01-31 20:19
  The 690s and the 7990s (I think, I really haven't payed attention to this card) are throttled it's better to get two 680s and 7970s.
• Mentosftw wrote on 2013-01-31 20:21
  And if they weren't?
  
  I wasn't really trying to make a comparison of the 680 and 690 but a comparison of sli and dual gpu cards.
• Halfslashed wrote on 2013-01-31 21:55
  Dual GPU means onboard SLI, so there isn't a difference.
• BobYoMeowMeow wrote on 2013-01-31 22:58
  If you have two Nvidia GPUs without appropriate cooling, your room is going to be toasty on christmas
• Osayidan wrote on 2013-01-31 23:26
  I prefer dual GPU instead of 2 cards in SLI. It's less power consumption (or if not in consumption then at least in connectors required on the PSU), less space used (a lot less), less heat produced and it's easier to manage the heat that is produced (less surface area to blast with fans). It's why I decided to go with a gtx590 instead of getting any other 2 cards in SLI. Not only that but I couldn't find much other cards with 3 DVI ports without needing adapters or splitters.
• RebeccaBlack wrote on 2013-02-01 03:27
  I own a dual GPU AMD card.
  
  

  
  
  • The airflow is easier to manage.
    
  • It isn't quite as powerful or resilient as two separate cards by nature of being one card. It's going to lose out a little in benchmarks and not be quite as fast as two separate cards. Maybe there are exceptions. It's not a big difference though.
    
  • Because of that, it's not going to be as hot or consume as much power as an SLI setup being that it's been adjusted to function in this format.
    
  • It will face problems that an SLI setup will not. This doesn't happen in all games, but because it is one card and not two, if there's a problem with SLI or a problem with the integration of the card in any way, it may be a bigger problem to deal with. With an SLI setup, you can simply run the game off one card and have it function alright until(/if) it gets fixed. If you play a lot of games you will inevitably run into this problem at some point, but if you're just playing half a dozen semi-regularly then it might not matter.
    

  
  

  (why you'd need so much power I have no idea).

  Ubersampling in The Witcher 2 and other challenging games, 1080p multi-monitor setups running at 60-120FPS stable, flight/driving/whatever simluators, very high resolution monitors (2-4K), Bitcoin mining, goldfarming, certain mathematical/computation stuff, fun, bragging rights, "futureproofing" (aka money wasting).
  
  If I wasn't so lazy I'd write up pages worth of info about why excessive computer stuff is actually useful in a practical way, lol. Just like how multi-monitor setups became popular, I'm sure they'll start to pop up more in consumer markets as they become more affordable.
• Mystickskye wrote on 2013-02-01 04:40
  RB has the jist of it. Generally the higher end cards push the limits of their design as they are already so when cards like the 680 and the 7970 get made they tend to get dumbed down a bit (though there was a dual GPU version of the 6850 card made at one point which wasn't dumbed down afaicr) so they fit within design specs. They're pretty good at it now though so often the loss isn't huge and if you really want you can push them back up a bit, the old 6990 actually came with a "warranty voiding" bios switch where the second bios would revert the GPUs to stock settings.
  
  One other thing which boils down to personal preference/OCD is that the design of dual GPU cards means that you'll always have some hot air blowing into your case. This is generally also true with non-reference GPUs anyway but there are some who buy GPUs that don't want any of that hot air going inside the case. The flipside of this is that those reference cards tend to sound like jet engines if you push them to full throttle and their cooling isn't as good as some non-reference cards can be.
  
  Another thing to consider with two separate cards is that depending on the layout of your case/mobo, one card can hamper the other cards ability to cool itself due to space restrictions. People have shown photos of rigs where the cards are literally sandwiched together which means that two of the three (and sometimes all three) cards aren't going to be cooled!
  
  For all intents and purposes though the computer simply sees two GPUs (and if you're not running full screen only one will be used) regardless of whether you get two on a single card or two separate cards. On that note, don't be fooled by the advertising of "twice the RAM". Usually in a multi GPU setup the RAM is allocated to each GPU and used in parallel so using the 6970 and the 6990 as an example (because I don't remember how much RAM current gen cards have off the top of my head), even though the 6970 is advertised with 2GB and the 6990 is advertised with 4GB of RAM in most applications the 6990 actually only has 2GB of RAM to use.
  
  I personally have two AMD 6950s (unlocked shaders and overclocked and all that jazz so basically overclocked 6970s) and they follow reference design so all the hot air is pumped out the back of the case. If I stick my face over the top of the back of my case I start to sweat ಠ_ಠ
  
  EDIT: Oh and just as a small note, SLI refers strictly to nVidia multi-GPU. AMD's version is CrossfireX though everyone just calls it crossfire.
• RebeccaBlack wrote on 2013-02-01 05:24

  Quote from Mystickskye;1023649:

  EDIT: Oh and just as a small note, SLI refers strictly to nVidia multi-GPU. AMD's version is CrossfireX though everyone just calls it crossfire.

  
  I was going to write about a Crossfire setup but I realized it might be confusing to some people so I went back and wrote SLI in place of stuff. Might've had a few mixups as a result.
  
  SLI and Crossfire are basically the same thing, but for different brands.
• Osayidan wrote on 2013-02-01 12:48
  I've seen even AMD fans call it SLI, I guess the term just became very popular. Like how people say "google it" even though other search engines exist, and the person might go use bing instead, but they still knew perfectly well what you meant.