Such thing as using 2 graphics cards??

JacoStanley

Hullo,

Just got a new Geforce 6600 GT 128mb to replace my fx5200. Can the 2 of them be used together and if so, what advantages would it have??

Cheers

aidan_walsh

To be able to link two graphics cards, you would need to have a physical connection between them. They would also need to be of the same chipset, and sometimes of the same manufacturer.

This is n't really something that has been done since the Vodoo2 had the SLI connection mode, but its coming back into vogue in recent times, with cards starting to come out supporting it.

MiCr0

does your pc have 2 agp slots?

Lump

Two cards can be used together, providing you have the correct connections on the motherboard, such as Micro said. You install the card you want to use as your main dispaly adaptor first then the second one after. The only advantage afaik is that you can use two monitors.... you can't combine the processing power of both cards for the one monitor!


John

Capt'n Midnight

not sure but some games (or demos of non-released games) allow you to have say three monitors, the main one and two side views for racing sims, not even sure if it ran on a PC or special arcade HW>

dual monitors can be handy for programmers - they can have the code on one monitor and the test app on the other. Or you can use remote management - have the remote PC's desktop in the other monitor.

There was an app a bit like the exact opposite of VNC that allowed you to have several PC's together and control them from one key board / mouse - when you moved the mouse off the edge of one screen it activated the next PC over the network..

Lump

Well I use 2 monitors for editing, two 19inch ones. It's also good for watching movie files while surfing the web, typing word documents.

John

cregser

Good for surfing on one and watching a match on the other.
Good for typing on one and MSN on the other.
Good for browsing to sites at once.
Good for my college project of looking at images in perspective stereo.

In fact its so good, you only realise it when you have it. I had a 17" and 15" but have since got a 19" and have little room on the desk for a second monitor.

# Back on topic #
JacoStanley, I suspect your fx5200 is a PCI card while the 6600GT is AGP??? If they're both AGP and you have two AGP slots, maybe you have a unique mobo that noone else has!

Anyway, SLI is the new thing where you need an SLI motherboard and two specially made SLI cards. SLI uses PCI-e however, and not AGP or PCI. It's possible, but not witha 5200 and 6600GT.

There is actually a card coming out that has two 6600GTs on a single card! IT's cheaper than a single 6800GT and faster than a 6800Ultra. But you need SLI.

padraigf

To use 2 graphics cards you need a motherboard with SLI support, and 2 matching PCI-Express graphics cards, also with SLI support. AGP cards are a no-go.

At the moment getting 2 6600GTs and using SLI is getting quite popular, even though it's retarded, a single 6800GT would be faster and cheaper.

Lump

padraigf wrote:

To use 2 graphics cards you need a motherboard with SLI support, and 2 matching PCI-Express graphics cards, also with SLI support. AGP cards are a no-go.

That's a load of rubbish, I use a PCI and an AGP card, together...


John

cregser

Depends what you want to achieve. Surely they don't share gpu processing. I'd assume your PCI card just acts as a monitor connector???

Matt Simis

cregser wrote:

Depends what you want to achieve. Surely they don't share gpu processing. I'd assume your PCI card just acts as a monitor connector???

I dont think Lump appreciates the point of SLI !
"Work together" and "work in the same machine" are quite different goals.

My 2x 6800GTO PCIe cards and Asus SLI board are in the post, will post an update on performance if anyone is interested in a few days?


Matt

Nukem

{just deleted pic}

6600GT's in Sli - kicking bottom or what !!!! (click here for stats)
Also no on the 5200+6600gt - not till gigabyte bring out ther new mobo,and they need to be similar Gfx,in your case th 5200 would drag the performance down

padraigf

Lump, that clearly wasnt what he was talking about. Using a PCI and AGP card will have zero performance gains. Wonder how you became a mod :rolleyes:
EDIT: just realised you were being sarcastic. oops

Nukem whats that about using two different graphics cards together ? Havent heard anything about it at all. You sure you arent thinking of the gigabyte card which will have 2 6600GTs on the same card?

sceptre

doodle_sketch wrote:

This is n't really something that has been done since the Vodoo2 had the SLI connection mode

That brings back memories (not that I ever had a voodoo2 mind, when they were expensive I couldn't afford one and when they were cheap I didn't want one)

JacoStanley

Alright cheers lads,

It's a no go area I presume. Just thought if I had it lying round I might as well use it.

Cheers again

Nukem

padraigf wrote:

Nukem whats that about using two different graphics cards together ? Havent heard anything about it at all. You sure you arent thinking of the gigabyte card which will have 2 6600GTs on the same card?

No 100% sure. I just have to find the bastarding link. I posted this ages ago about the new mobos. Anyways i wouldnt get too worried not out til somewhere mid-late 05. Def Gigabyte though.

RicardoSmith

JacoStanley wrote:

Hullo,

Just got a new Geforce 6600 GT 128mb to replace my fx5200. Can the 2 of them be used together and if so, what advantages would it have??

Cheers

Depends on what you mean by use. Do you mean use more than one monitor or display for video editing, gaming, work etc. Or do you mean use together to improve gaming performance increasing the fps at higher resolutions. As you replaced the fx5200 with a 6600GT they must use the same slot. Which must mean AGP. As you've only one slot you can't use them together. Unless of course the fx5200 is PCI in which case you can use it with the 6600GT. But if you want to run two monitors the 6600GT can do this on its own without another card. You connect one to the DVI the other to the VGA port. You can get a DVI to VGA adapter for the DVI port.

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use together to increase performance..

You can link two Voodoo2 PCI SLI cards (Ancient cards to improve gaming performance). Got dropped when AGP was faster using just one card.

You can link two PCI-e SLI cards if you have a motherboard with 2xPCI-e slots and two identical PCI-e SLI graphics cards like the 6600GT (PCI-e version only) to improve gaming performance.

There are some custom cad and rendering machines that can use multiple cards like this aswell. But they are mad money.

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Then you can use multiple cards to have multiple displays.


These days many cards can run to monitors of the one card, one through the VGA and the other through the DVI connector. Some can run a TV out aswell, and some of the Matrox cards can run three or four monitors all from one card.

You can also use an AGP card and a PCI card together. You can use a few PCI cards together. I think you can have up to 3 or 4 cards. Some motherboards allow you to use the onboard AGP with a PCI card some don't. Its also dependent on the OS. Windows 98, W2K and XP all allow you to do this. Mac's have done this for years.

For gaming the game has to support this feature. Not all games do. MS FLight Sim does and some racing games do aswell. I've seen it running with GPL and some space games. Some allow you to span the picture across two monitors so you get a widescreen view, if the game supports it.

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tuxy

Nukem wrote:

6600GT's in Sli - kicking bottom or what !!!! (click here for stats)

you mean getting the same results as a 6800gt
2 6600gt = same price as a 6800gt

Nukem

tuxy wrote:

you mean getting the same results as a 6800gt
2 6600gt = same price as a 6800gt

In some cases the 2*6600gts are better. Not goin into arguement no point. You can see from the graphs the 2*6600gt beat the single 68800gt in some games/programs but not in others.
Its not like you would go out and buy 2*6600gts instead of a 6800gt?????????
Only from an upgrade point of view.

padraigf

The problem with SLI is its incredibly limited base of supported games. Almost every game out there doesnt support it yet. nVidia only released driver support for the very few top games that benchmarking sites use, obviously to make it seem like they have the best solution.
The problem with this is that in a game which doesnt support SLI (eg World of Warcraft) your performance will be even slower than a single card by itself. This (along with the extortionate prices and limited availability of PCI-E cards and SLI motherboards) is what kept me away from it.

Thordon

The problem with this is that in a game which doesnt support SLI (eg World of Warcraft) your performance will be even slower than a single card by itself

I find that hard to believe, and even if its true, whats stopping you from just removing/disabling the 2nd card.

padraigf

Thordon, if you dropped €600 for 2*6600GTs and an SLI motherboard would you want to have to muck around with enabling and disabling individual graphics cards and rebooting the PC to play different games? For such a highly vaunted graphics solution i'd expect them to have patches supporting each new game before each game was actually out! They only have to write 2 or 3 lines of code to add support for each game and they couldnt even be bothered! (Actually theres only 3 letters that matter in that code, SFR; Single Frame Rendering and AFR; Alternate Frame Rendering)

And a quick google search will remove your disbelief. Plenty of people all over the place complaining about it.

nVidia seem to have responded to storm of complaints though... Now theyre releasing a tool so that you can make your own config files! Wow! It really does show a total lack of care for anything other than benchmark figures on their part.

unkel

Staggering that nobody on this thread has posted yet that on most modern (agp or pci-e) graphics cards, you can connect multiple monitors. Both the ATI and NVIDIA platforms have supported this for years...

RicardoSmith

RicardoSmith wrote:

.....
These days many cards can run to monitors of the one card, one through the VGA and the other through the DVI connector. Some can run a TV out aswell, and some of the Matrox cards can run three or four monitors all from one card. .....

...Ahem....

po0k

Capt'n Midnight wrote:

There was an app a bit like the exact opposite of VNC that allowed you to have several PC's together and control them from one key board / mouse - when you moved the mouse off the edge of one screen it activated the next PC over the network..

http://sourceforge.net/projects/synergy2/

Really nice piece of software.

Micro -