Eerrr.. what's a SLI? Simply put, it's just a technology to let user uses 2 similar graphic cards as 1. Imagine having 2 engines in a car, how fast can this baby goes? Hahaha! Wouldn't it be expensive? Yupe, like everything else in the world, this is just another using money to buy time/performance idea, a luxury toy, that's why I call it a dream in the first place.
When I bought my rig around 2 years ago, I already have this idea to setup a SLI, of course I'm that loaded, couldn't straight get 2 graphic cards in 1 go, but the system specs were definitely toward this idea. The card I bought is Leadtek Winfast PX6600 GT TDH, best affordable mid range card at that time. Around 2 years later, I got myself another one, second hand, which cost almost 4 times cheaper when I first bought it. Sigh, everyday things obsolete, and computer stuffs are the most significant of them.
I got the other card plugged in, and connected them with the SLI bridge. After booted into Windows, it detected the extra card and setting up the driver, but when I tried to go in the Display properties, it doesn't show any SLI thingy, that's odd. A quick check to the motherboard manual, found out that I need to adjust some jumpers so enable it, hahaha, should have check thoroughly first.
SLI in da house!
Notice the copper fan underneath the graphic card, that's the troublesome heatsink fan.
After restarted, things seem to be in order now, there's a SLI menu to enable the setup, so far so good. Now of course time to test out the performance, I loaded up 3DMark05, a 3D graphic benchmarking program, and proceed to the tests. Wow, the frame rate showed almost 80% increment, which is really good! And when I was excited and satisfied with the result, suddenly a "beep beep beep" sound snapped me awake. It was from my motherboard, sound like this usually means there's something wrong with your hardware. I quickly canceled the test and jump back to Windows, and the screen was showing my motherboard chipset, the nForce 4 SLI, having a whopping temperature of 71 degrees celcius!!
Previously the heatsink fan on this chip was dead, and I had to replace it with another one as recommended in the motherboard forum. The temperature after I installed the new heatsink fan was not much different with the dead one. Now it proves I did a bad job installing it. The heatsink is not really designed for the motherboard so it's kinda loose. Sigh, now I had to redo the whole process again, and this involves taking out the motherboard from the case, remove the heatsink, clean it and attach it again, which is damn troublesome!!
This time I stick the thing in a different position, which seems quite secure even after the graphic card plugged in above it. The temperature monitor shows a figure of around 60 degrees, good, acceptable temperature after CPU overclocked and SLI enabled.
Finally I can proceed to test my baby in action! Here's some result I've got:
How many people has the chance to setup a SLI? Most of them just thinking better upgrade to a better card instead of spend more on obsolete model. But frankly, it's really cool when seeing 2 cards in action, I've experienced it, I've done it, and that's what matters.
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