Upgrade Help Requested

[Vomitmeister]

I am looking into doing an upgrade to an older computer. I am thinking about going to an i5-2500k cpu. I will probably get a new NVidia GTX560 video card. I have an old 8800GT laying around. I was wondering if it is worth getting an SLI motherboard so that I can stick the 8800Gt in to use as a physics card?

Thanks

[Snapshot]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nvidia_...in_video_games

If the price of the SLI motherboard doesn't get you off-budget and if you routinely play some of the games which support it, sure, go for it.

Personally, I find it odd that you can still buy SLI and non-SLI motherboards. AMD chipset-based motherboards are all Crossfire-capable (if they have more than one PCIx16 slot).

[Vomitmeister]

Thanks for the info. Although I do have a couple of games on that list, seeing such a short list makes me think it isn't worth it. My plan is to upgrade my wife's computer and then give her mine. Maybe to save some money, I will stick the 8800GT back into my computer and take the GTX550ti that is in it and stick it into the upgraded machine.

Do you think getting another GTX550ti and running it in SLI would make much of an improvement?

[Snapshot]

IIRC there's something called micro-stutter that the people at Tom's Hardware discovered some while ago. Apparently, it affects some SLI/Crossfire setups and actually causes graphics 'deceleration'. Can't remember the specifics but the test is somewhere in their archive.

[Vomitmeister]

Thanks Snapshot. From what I was reading, the SLI mode just sounds like a bigger PITA than it is probably worth. I think I will just stick with the video cards I have and just swap them around.

[Shoboy]

I have two 8800gts's(640mb RAM each) and I had them in SLI for the longest time. One card started acting stupid so I turned off SLI and only used the main card. Then some drivers came out that let me use the 2nd card for physix so that's what it's set for now, but I dont really play any games that use physix..... When SLI did work it wasn't a major increase. Some games I would see 50-60% increase in performance for sure, but most would come in around 25-30%. I bought these cards within weeks of each other, always planning on doing that when I had started building my rig at that time. As it is now, when I do upgrade my system I wont bother with SLI. It's a waste of money to me because my gaming has REALLY slowed down over the years and I also do NOT play many "new" games that would use that type of config.

[Vomitmeister]

I bought my stuff and am now waiting for everything to be delivered. I ended up with an SLI/Crossfire capable mobo, just because it had other features I wanted and wasn't too outrageously priced. I needed a board with three connectors for speakers and one for the microphone for a total of 4 audio ports. Also, I prefer a board with four slots for memory. When I looked at the non-SLI boards, they tended to only have three audio ports total, so something was missing. This board had it all for a price I could live with. I won't use the SLI at this time, but at least I have it available should I want to go that route.

I went with Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit os, i5-2500k cpu, 16GB of ram, a 2TB drive and 750w power supply. I also picked up an IDE controller card so I can keep a couple of the old drives in there.

Thanks all for the recommendations.

Jim