SLI - Will it help?

[Nuke]

sli has been pretty much been a gimmick. i remember back when it was a 3dfx thing, you would see a pair of voodoo 2s daisy chained with analog cables with a 3rd dedicated 2d card. at this time i was still happy with my voodoo1 which was getting me 120 fps in descent 2 under dos. in the modern incarnations i hear that drivers support is horrible. only a few games can really take advantage of sli/crossfire, and usually only in direct3d (i play a lot of opengl games, and thats what my game engine uses, so not much gain for me). if you can get the whole thing to work for you, and you wont miss the cash, it will give you a modest performance boost over what you already have with one card. i prefer to do more frequent upgrades than do super builds, and seldom build over $800 rigs. you could end up spending a couple grand (its not just the cards, its the power supply, mobo, and additional cooling) chasing that extra 10-20%.

Edited November 1, 2013 by Nuke