Gadgetory

nvidia sli technology was introduced back in 2004 it allowed users to run two graphics cards simultaneously to theoretically double 3d gaming performance versus what could be achieved with a single card here we are ten years later the technology has changed a lot now we have professional-grade sli for 3d rendering multi way sli with support for three or even four graphics processors concurrently and a plethora of different operational modes but the misconceptions about it have stayed pretty much the same so first up sli only works with cards based on the same graphics processor and with the same amount of onboard memory you can run these two cards in sli mode because they are identical these ones will still work because they are both GTX 780 s that's the GPU or graphics processor with three gigabytes of RAM that's the memory even though they are from different manufacturers you only start running into trouble when you want to pair up two gig cards with four gig cards or two gig cards with different GPUs or mix Nvidia cards with AMD cards etc so guys it's not going to work so please stop trying beyond choosing the right cards setting up SLI is pretty easy you'll need an SLI ready operating system and sli certified motherboard with two PCI Express 16x slots and sli bridge and a power supply that can provide enough power for as many cards as you're running nvidia has guidelines for all this stuff linked in the video description or better yet you can get personalized advice by posting in the Linus tech tips comm forum alright so what are the benefits number one as I mentioned before is better performance especially at higher resolutions like 2560 by 1440 and 4k number two is better graphical fidelity instead of running at 130 FPS when your monitor only displays 60 images per second you can crank up the settings for better image quality while maintaining an acceptable frame rate number three is it looks awesome for lots of folks the improved performance while very important is not the only reason they do it it's shallow but I know I'm not the only one who thinks this way well gosh that sounds perfect right sign me up we'll hold on a second it's not all rosy the law of diminishing returns comes down pretty hard on SLI configuration two cards obviously costs twice as much as one but it's rare for that to actually completely double your performance in a real-world scenario and even less common to see triple the performance with three cards you'll also see increased power consumption and heat output so you want to make sure your power supply is adequate your PC case ventilation is adequate and in some extreme cases your room ventilation is adequate game compatibility is much better than it used to be but there are still games that don't have any kind of SLI support especially right at release so that second card might be sitting there doing nothing sometimes especially if you're one of those people who lines up at midnight to buy the latest games finally there's the issue of micro stuttering or frame time variants which some people are more or less susceptible to but NVIDIA has that mostly taken care of compared to the competition while that last bit probably sounded like I was pretty down on SLI I'm not multi card configurations are the only way to get truly next-generation performance today and for gamers who want to play at very high resolutions with very high detail settings and always get butter smooth frame rates those trade-offs we talked about before are going to sound like no big deal hence the continued success of SLI today almost 10 years after its introduction speaking of masterful segues into ads hotspot Shield VPN has offered 20% off elite prices to our viewers by using the link in the video description and it is a great way to improve your privacy online while enjoying some other great benefits it obscures your IP from the websites you visit which makes it much more difficult to find out who you are and where you live and it also allows you to circumvent pesky regional restrictions on services such as Netflix government-imposed blackouts on services such as YouTube or Facebook and it works on PCs Macs mobile devices and even helped save money on your mobile data plan on iOS by compressing data on the fly when your web surfing so check out the link in the video description for a free trial and use code Linus for 20% off of a paid subscription this has been another fastest possible episode here on tech wiki liked the video if you liked it dislike it if you disliked it leave a comment if you have any brilliant ideas for future fast as possible episodes and as always don't forget to subscribe