I do agree on the whole "Whoever puts it our first will eventually loose i.e. NVidia Video Cards , VIA Chipsets."

The SLI problem I am having is totally a driver issue. I have since fixed the issue. I called Nvidia, they gave me a private ftp link to download from, again another beta_driver, which works much better. I sold the machine 2 days ago, wheww, glad that is over with. Here is the funny thing though. I thought I would go ahead and build another. So I went to the ftp site so I could download the driver on my main computer. No ftp could be found. So I called Nvidia back, the new rep. said he had no idea what I was talking about. Mmmmmmmmmmmm, I must have talked to the Nvidia Tooth Fairy. Well My x800 XT Plat. Edition for my AGP Gaming machine will do me just fine for a while. Here is a pic of my case before I replaced my Power supplu, here shown is a 480watt Thermatake. I also sent some pics of my setup at a local Internet Cafe 50 man LAN party in Salt lake City, UT.

http://www.comtekservices.net/1/pc7.JPG
http://www.comtekservices.net/1/pc8.JPG
http://www.comtekservices.net/1/pc9.JPG
http://www.comtekservices.net/1/pc3.JPG

3200+ AMD 64bit Socket 754 w/Thermaltake SilentTower 4 in 1 CPU Cooler
GIGABYTE GA-K8NSNXP nForce3 250 Chipset Motherboard
1gig (2x 512mg) PC3200 OCZ Performance Dimms DDR400
2 x 74gig Raptor HDD's WD 10,000rpm
2 x 250gig Maxtor 7,200rpm 16mg cache Diamond 10 ATA133 HDD's
2 x 160gig SATA150 Maxtor HDD's 7,200rpm
Audigy 2 Zs Plat. EX Audio
x800 XT Plat. Edition Sapphire Video 256mg
Raidmax "Samarui" Blue Case
560watt Thermaltake True Power P/S
NEC 16x Dual DVD/RW
NEC 8x Dual DVD/RW
Sony 1.44mg Floppy
2 x Enermax Silver HDD Coolers (5 1/4" Bay)

Love the rig mate, though it has a few to many devices for me to be bothered rigging up lol, mine has enough cables for all the fans in it and its more than i could be bothered to do. The only problems i have heard ass. with SLI are driver problems similar to yours, though it seems nvidia will have to release a pack of drivers, or put them on the video card driver cd. Anyone else keep posting SLI horror stories if you have them.
cheers

In a narrow perspective, SLi looks like award winning technology (although it doesn't take a genius to figure out that if you double your constituents, you raise efficiency).

However, in a more broad sense, it's really just for benchmark bragging rights. While it might allow you to kick the crap out of everything else at 3DMark, it's not going to make gaming anymore enjoyable.

I don't know anyone who's used to lockups and freezes in any game with their 6600GT, let alone a 6800 or 6800 Ultra.

Sure, you'd be able to run games with full AA and AF at higher resolutions, but in most FPS's, you're usually not paying attention to detail unless you're playing single player.

Then again, 16X AA isn't going to make Doom III's ending any better.


I would really be an advocate for SLi if they had a feature my 3DLabs Realizm has... dual link DVI, which supports maximum resolutions of 3840 x 2400.

For people having trouble with SLi, try these drivers:

Forceware 71.50 for Win 2k/XP: http://downloads.guru3d.com/download.php?det=955

Forceware 70.80 for AMD64, IA-64, WinXPx64, Win2k3x64: http://downloads.guru3d.com/download.php?det=946


I'll try working on seeing what exactly the inherent problem with stability is and possibly release my own set of drivers to address that.... if anyone is interested of course.


I just got a good idea for SLi owners, though... try running Stereo3D while on SLi. That'd be awesome.

Problem with all this talk is that we are near the end of PC games as far as I am concerned. We need 3 or 4 "Civilization" or "Sims" type games every year if it is to survive (ie multi million PC sales), and we are plainly not getting that. We talk about Halo and Unreal and whatever, but they will not run on 85% of home pc's out there and are not of interest to the people that own those PC's either. Unless we solve the problem of market penetration soon, there will be no point in any of this hardware designed to run the latest games, because there will be no new PC games. Period. What developer/publisher is going to spend $30 million plus on a Halo 4 type PC game in 3 years that will sell 200-300,000 in the UK (and say double that in the U.S)? When you can spend that same $30 million and if you get a top 20 console hit, let alone a No.1, that will be 5 million unit sales plus in the U.S. alone.

PC games sales having been dropping every year for 5 years now, both in real terms and in terms of percentage sales vs console game sales. Go into any "mainstream" department store and look at what they carry. More and more console and "budget" PC games. 5 years ago a big release would see 10 to 15 copies on the shelf, now it's 3 or 4 with frequent re-ordering because the retailer doesn't trust PC game sales anymore. One Half Life 2 and Doom 3 every three years or so is just not enough.

I am in England, 14 million households have a PC. A game like Need For Speed Underground 2, currently No.1 in the PC sales chart has sold just under 300,000 copies. That is a pitiful market penetration. They talk about the end of CD singles here in the UK because you can get a number one with 50,000 sales; 10 years ago you need over 100,000 sales to get to number one. We are in the same position with PC game sales and yet there is no debate, just head in the sand talk about the latest 64 bit processor or NVidia card, or as today, SLI. Imagine a situation where in the financial columns of the world they were talking about oil running out in a few years and then seeing a forum talking about the new technology going into the latest cars....That is where we're at I believe with PC gaming and associated hardware needs.

If in 3 years the only people buying PC games are people like us, there will be no PC games in three years.

So to end my diatribe; I don't get excited anymore by things like SLI and such anymore; like I did 5 or 10 years ago. Just can't see what i'll have to run on a rig like that in a couple years - other than a decent PS3 emulator maybe....?

By the way. I never have owned a console and have been PC gaming for over 15 years. I have a collection of over 500 PC games and specifically have an old PC to play the old DOS games which I still enjoy occasionally. I have had a small computer game business (1991-97) and have managed game retail stores (97/98), so I am not a console freak dissing the PC for the sake of it. I say all the above with a heavy heart and a sigh.

For those that have SLi and are having trouble with it, could someone try what I've suggested here:

http://www.hardwareanalysis.com/content/topic/37983/

Thanks

I think Ingram's post is dead on. If some of you are old enough to remember the c64 market back in the eighties , you'll recall the relationship between the computer mags devoted to it (in terms of number and number of pages) and the health of the market for the c64. As time went on, the mags started getting thinner and thinner and there were fewer titles out there. The same thing has happened to the PC gaming industry.

Now, its true that we have internet gaming sites, and they have hurt magazine sales, but there are still vastly more console magazine titles out there and the internet gaming sites themselves are about 3/4s devoted to the consoles.

Where I think the PC gaming industry has really screwed up is quality of product first delivered to market. Unlike the consoles, where you simply cannot ship a buggy unfinished game to market and survive for very long, in the PC world its almost expected. Couple that shoddy practice with generally lackluster, unimaginative games, and you've got a dead market. For every half-life2, StarCraft, or Diablo, you have 10 Dikatana titles. The one area that PC's have a distinct advantage is the FPS market (and perhaps to a lesser extent the MMORPG market). But I doubt those advantages will be enough to hold the market and it may disappear entirely with new generations of consoles due out soon.

And don't even get me started on the epidemic level of cheating on many of the FPSes out there today, another advantage to the consoles where it is generally harder to cheat (though admittedly not impossible), particularly on Xbox Live.

Bottom line, SLI is a clever marketing tool that will relieve the PC fan boys of more money without really giving them much of an advantage in the real world, and it will do absolutely nothing for the PC gaming industry in general beyond generating buzz amongst the ever shrinking numbers of the faithful.

I agree SLI is a great idea but its not worth the money for the little performance gain you receive in return after spending $2000+ dollars, And i know some of you are thinking im jealous right about now, well guess what im not at all. My system can smoke an SLI machine in most real games except for doom 3 of course, SLI is only the king of benchmarks and i must stress the word ONLY. So you have to ask yourself, am i ready to fork over $2000+ dollars on something that in the very near future will become completely obsolite and is already being phased out. ATI's new line of cards will be 2-3 times faster than a Current 6800 Ultra SLI Rigs and for less than half of the cost. Im not trying to say dont buy SLI but there will be many more options to choose from in the coming months, so hold onto your cash until you see what ATI has to offer with its Multi Render capabilities, which is said to out perform SLI for a fraction of the cost. by the way i have a Athlon 64 3700+ @ 3.34 Ghz, ATI X800 XT PE @ 694/789, 1gig corsair XMS XL

Actually i think that is a fact now, that the second releaser will have sucess. Take a look back in time, Sega Saturn, and the Dreamcast. Sony took Sega's systems analized them and made sure their systems did not have those problems in their system's. And guess what it worked, where is Sega now making games instead of hardware, for the fact they cant stand up to a Copy Cat company like Sony that ruined their reputation and forced them to throw in the towel. The same applies to Nvidia and ATI, both company's are going down the same road as Sega and Sony and if my guess is right one of them will also throw in the towel in the years to come.

Take a 1500 dollar rig with a 6800GT....add 400 bucks...you get 50-100% performance increase across all 3D games...(tahnks to users being able to make their own profiles....Finally)....I dont see 2000 dollars anywhere....its like saying hey i got a decent 754 rig already....i wont shed 3000 dollars for a killer 939 system....no s**t whats the point you already have a killer rig....

Your reason fro SLi being bad is going down the wrong direction.....SLI is bad because of poor support and high risk especially with the goddam asus sli boards......pricewise...these no dif....you wanna an extra GFX card? thats a different question....

Personally ATI and NVIDIA....the pattern cant be apllied with the SEGA case.....ATi and NVIDIA both have their own pattern..ever since the ti-4200 and the radeon 8500 theres been a pretty fixed pattern: one released killer card....gets c**ky and screws up aout the same time the competition makes its killer card....and vice versa for every new release...its a fact...just look at 8500 vs ti-4200 ...... 9700 and 9800 pro vs 5800 and 5900..........6800 vs x800......x850 vs SLI

p.s. go to the thread about nvidia's G70 and R520.....this thread died long ago

So has anyone started putting together alot of ATI CrossFire Systems? I love the Idea of ATI doing it better, and would love to support them if they have done it right yet again

Crossfire has been known to have even more problems than SLI, as in SLI you can game just fine and it crashes when you exit the game, but in Crossfire, good luck doing anything at all...

But yes I have been having issues with my SLI setup too...

I wish I just got a system with a single 7900GTX in it.... or even a X1900... as much as I'd like to avoid ATIs horrendous drivers... which is all costs so that's saying a lot (although Omega drivers are 1000% better). I haven't ever had an issue with nvidia other than until the 6000 series came out, they were smoked by ATIs 9000 series and then X000 series since the Geforce2 days with the sole problem that their drivers always suck (Omega drivers which are at least 30% faster often fix all of your problems, but not always).