Gadgetory

when you hear the letters SLI you probably think of grande gaming machines that can rush anything like urban gtx 280 TI sli for titans but what about the other end of the spectrum just how bad can an SLI gaming machine be well once again Linus tech tips is bringing you the answer to a burning question that nobody asked cooller masters 25th anniversary edition cosmos 2 features a unique dual curved tempered glass side panel check it out now at the link below so it all started while we were working on cheapest Newegg PC and we stumbled across something astonishing hey our graphics card supports sli and we've got two of them so of course we immediately set out to build what would end up being the cheapest and almost the worst SLI rig possible but the reason that we bought two of those GeForce 8400 Gs cards was actually in case one of them broke and it's always a good plan when we're ordering super cheap and old stuff for videos on a deadline and sure enough while attempting to test SLI one of them broke almost immediately but honestly they weren't actually the worst SLI capable cards that Nvidia ever made and if we were going to have to buy more cards anyway we felt like we should really go for the worst of the worst I mean effectively we were aware that there wouldn't be much difference between a turd burger and nail clipping soup and nail clipping soup but here at Linus tech tips we only accept the best of the best or the worst of the worst so I present to you hailing from the Year 2006 the NVIDIA GeForce 7100 GS the worst Nvidia graphics card to ever feature support for SLI these things are so fricking worthless that it's hard to find one of them let alone two I mean on eBay there were a couple available but no matching pairs and that's ignoring completely unreasonable shipping costs even our industry contacts like EVGA and a soos didn't bother holding on to any of these so they had nothing kicking around because why would they fortunately though we have awesome fans and after a Twitter post Matt and Archer Grimes hooked us up with these beautiful specimens thanks guys so the GeForce 7100 then a card that was basically a rebrand of the worst card on the market from the year 2000 for the GeForce 6200 but now with SLI so with a whopping 20 watt power draw a blistering 350 megahertz core clock and 300 megahertz memory clock these things are only out computed by the most experienced abacus users hailed in their time as only acceptable for office use and anything but sensible we're expecting running these cards in games to be about like taking your dad's lawn mower to LeMans and you've got to put smoke so we toss them in our system and huh where's the set SLI configuration option I mean it says so on the webpage SLI maybe it's Windows 10 screwing with our drivers but in Windows 7 it doesn't work either documentation for running these guys in SLI is basically a couple of jokes about it on Tech forums from 10 years ago and then one German review website that did get it to work so there was still hope after some more digging we found out that only x58 boards and older will work with the SLI drivers so rock on then x it oh crap then while installing the board on our bench one of the capacitors literally fell off its leads so after stealing a similar enough one off of another dead motherboard and soldering it on we were back in business maybe it still wouldn't work after some more digging it turns out that maybe only 32-bit versions of Windows will support this old of SLI making the 48 gigs of ram in our system look a little in Bund unnecessary but we decided to leave it all in there anyway because it looks cool in the end almost hash tag out of ideas we blew the dust off of our CD drive burned ourselves a copy of Windows XP 32-bit and spent about a morning in driver compatibility hell until finally yes finally we had the pinnacle of piss-poor PC performance so first we tried out some games using one of the 70 100's to set a baseline where it performed about as well as you'd expect one-and-a-half FPS from 3dmark 2006 like 10 in crisis and actually a pretty good experience in halo combat Evolved and well over 60 frames per second in 3d mark 2001 se so we were hopeful about its performance with sli enabled until well everything crashed almost immediately 3d mark 2001 2006 halo crisis and half-life 2 the sli performance of this machine completely exceeded our expectations for how crap it would be truly the definition of unplayable the only 3d object that wouldn't crash the computer immediately was the 3d text screensaver and even that had stuttering issues and we aren't talking soft crashes here you open a game food and you'll be reaching for the reset switch we tried a bunch of different drivers from 91 point 4 5 all the way up to 307 since we wanted at least one game to work so we could compare performance and they all immediately died with SLI enabled so you might be asking yourself then why bother releasing this video at all well I guess it's because we learned some things along the way that we felt were important to pass along one driver support for eleven-year-old graphics cards isn't great number two Windows XP isn't as good as we all remember it being number three capacitors can fall off old motherboards pretty easily then can be fixed pretty easily and finally four holy sweet spitballs whatever you do don't run the 70 100 GS in SLI you're welcome King is the mobile carrier that is focused on customer service and customer satisfaction first you don't speak to a robot when you call customer service at ting you get put through directly to a person and somehow they manage that with an average King bill for their customers out there of only 23 bucks a month per device because ting is all about the concept of paying for only what you use so this is cool you go on to their website we've got a link below - ENCOM and you try out the savings calculator you enter your last few bills with your current carrier and how much data and talktime you used and it spits out whether you would save money on ting and if you would save money on ting they will actually cover 25 percent of your cancellation fee out of your existing contract up to $75 and if you use our link down below you'll also get 25 bucks in service credits or towards a new device so go try it out that's linus kang comm so thanks for watching guys if you just like this video you can hit that button but if you liked it hit the like button get subscribed maybe consider checking out where to buy a new graphics card in the video description also down there is our merch store where you can buy cool shirts like this one and our community forum which you should totally join