SLi/Xfire Feedback

[saaya]

Alright, now lets see who here runs SLi/Xfire or plans to

READ FIRST! Please note, its about the max amount of vgas you plan to use, not whether you run SLI or Xfire or QuadSLI or QUadXfire! Please vote for how many vgas you ever use or plan to use, even if its just for benching. For example, I run a single vga but bench with xfire/sli sometimes, so i voted for dual vga, not planning to ever go tri

Thanks for the feedback!

[warlove3]

4xVGA for benchmarking =D, would like to see it implement, might be using it in the future.

[BenchZowner]

With the current graphics hardware, single card ( single-GPU ) for gaming, 2-way & 3-way SLI / CrossFire for benching.

[HDCHOPPER]

3 pcie X16 slots .. as a min 2 pciex16 & 1 pcie x8

[CmB]

The more the merrier! Who doesn't like options, you can always use less gpus than the maximum.

[saaya]

well... there is only so much space on a board...
you want to be able to run a pci and pciE card as well, even when running sli.
thats still fine with the space we have on the board, but when it comes to tri or quad, things get tricky...

when you go tri, you can only afford to have 1 extra slot between pciE 16s slots 1 and 2.
thats necessary for dualslot hatsinks... but ideally you want 2 slots between pciE 16x slots 1 and 2, so then you have some air circulation for the top card.
unless, you sacrifice having a pci and pciE slot available... then, you could have 2 slots between pciE 16x 1 and 2

the best option seems to be to have the third pciE 16x slot on the bottom of the board, that way tri sli and tri xfire wont work with 3 dualslot heatsink inside a small case, but thats very unlikely to happen anyways... and moving it there allows you to have a pci and pciE x1 slot still available even when running tri sli. Like i said, its all a matter of deciding whats more important... you cant have it all... the layout is either optimized for tri or dual vga operation, and then there are variations of how many slots your still able to use with those cards installed...

and for 1156... well the only pciE lanes to the cpu that arent crippled by the DMI interface of the chipset to the cpu, are 16 lanes... thats not a lot if you want to run sli/xfire...

and another thing is signal routing... pci is coming from the southbridge and pciE from the nb or cpu, if you cross those signal traces then the quality gets worse and it might even not be possible depending on how many layers pcb you use and how many components you have around the slots such as firewire, eSATA raid/sas etc...