Hi, I need a little help to upgrade my PC, as I don't know much about Hardware side. My motherboard 'Asus P5ND2-SLI/Deluxe nForce 4 Skt 775 Dual SLI PCI-E GB-LAN 1394 USB2 8ch.audio SATA/RAID Prescott and Dual-Core compatible ATX' is: The video card I already have installed is 'PNY GEFORCE 7800GT 256MB DDR3 PCI-E DUAL DVI/HDTV-out'. As the motherboard supports dual SLI video card, so I'm wondering does the second video card have to be same or could it be different GEFORCE one, as the one I already have has been discontinued for sale. Thanks Umer
you have to have the same card so you will have to buy a 7800 GT from the same manufacture, you cant add a 7800 GT eVGA, or 7800 GTX or a 8800GT /GTX. another 7800GT in SLI mode will almost double the fps, so if you're getting 25fps a sli will give you say 40 - 45 (increase of about 70%) if your games are running slow (say ~30fps) then a sli will be worth the money, but if your games are under 20fps it would be better in the long term to buy a new card, say a 8800GT, if your fps is 10fps then buying SLI will be a waste of money. if your planning on buying games in the near future i would suggest buying an 8800GT /GTX as games need a lot more power, most commonly with the release of DX10 games will need to run on supported DX10 cards, the 7800 series is only DX9c compatible, so your future plans for gaming really needs to be a 8800 series (including windows vista for DX10 support) and forget sli for now
First of all thanks for explaining it to me. The game i'm playing is The Settlers IV and the game runs a bit slow when I am scrolling within a terrain of a map, so from that I guess that frames per second is slow? As 7800GT has been discontinued for sale, what other cards can you recommend which will work best in parallel with each other on my motherboard P5ND2-SLI?
the system requirements are gforce 4 series, you certinally meet this requirement for this game so the SLI option will be a good move, you can find a 7800GT on amazon, or any other second-hand market what is your cpu?
I have tried amazon, its unavailable: Amazon.co.uk: PNY GeForce 7800 GTX 256MB PCI-E Graphics Card with DVI & HDTV-OUT: Electronics & Photo My CPU is: Intel Pentium 4 650 3.4Ghz Socket 775 800mhz 2mb Cache.
Oops, I just had a thought im not completely sure if your video card has to be the same manufacture somethings telling me it should, something else tells me it should'nt i'll study up for you now your cpu is impressive it is highly overclockable to at least 3.8Ghz so you could try overclocking first before buying a new gpu
I saw a review about this motherboard on the following website which says that "SLI Under SLI mode: support two identical SLI-ready graphics cards" MADSHRIMPS - Hardware Reviews ,Crazy Projects, Modding Tutorials and Overclocking sorry for asking ignorant questions, but how do I over clock my CPU? :O
ive been doin a bit of research on the nvidia webby and it seems you CAN mix graphic card manufactures with SLI provided they have the same chipset (ie 7800 GT) so try Amazon.com: Online Shopping for Electronics, Apparel, Computers, Books, DVDs & more or Newegg.com - Buy Computer Parts, PC Components, Laptop Computers, Digital Cameras and more! regularly for 7800GTs ---overclocking--- its always a bit risky overclocking, but if you do it right you can get you cpu upto 4GHz and stable (depending on the temperature) your motherboard also has a fail-safe device which automatically tempory resets the bios to defaults settings if the cpu fails to overclock properly first off you need to find out the cpu's "multipiler", download http://www.cpuid.com/download/cpu-z-141.zip and find out your multipiler
I have found few selling on ebay, ofcourse second hand, but they are something like: Gainward Bliss 7800GT 512Mb PCX Golden Sample Gainward nVidia Graphics card 7800GT PCI-E 512MB 7647 Would these have same chipset as mine one?
yes according to the nvidia website Answer ^answer 8 make sure you get the latest drivers, also dont forget to change the sli-clip thingy on the motherboard
Yeh, it does say that they would be similar " 8) Verify your two graphics cards match. For example, a GeForce 7800 GTX must be paired with another GeForce 7800 GTX. Likewise, a GeForce 6600 GT must be paired with another GeForce 6600 GT. However, using the latest Release 80 graphics drivers, NVIDIA GPUs sold by different manufacturers can be used together in SLI mode. For example, a GeForce 7800 GT from vendor ABC can be matched with a GeForce 7800 GT from vendor XYZ. " but even if the other one's memory size differs?
i remember seeing on the site that on at least one particular nvidia card it was capible of having indifferent ram sizes, but they were talking about one chipset in particular, im not sure if yours will or not but identical ram will double your card ram when in sli (if your card is 512mb you will get a total of 1024mb)
