in a pickle having to do with SLI

Tonight, I figured out that I'm in a sort of pickle. The first thing I should mention is that I want to try to avoid buying more than one or two new parts.

What I mainly want to do is upgrade my graphics. At first, I figured doing something with SLI / bridging cards (I don't know much about how to set it up) would be the easiest and cheapest. But my motherboard only has one AGP slot, which is taken by the current card, and five empty PCI slots, which I understand are now out-of-date and no longer used by graphics cards (AGP replaced it, then PCI Express replaced that, right?).

So there are no graphics cards I can get that would be sufficient enough for my needs, and I'm not even sure if you can bridge a card from an AGP slot with one from a PCI slot (again, I don't know much about bridging cards). So that led me to thinking about getting a new motherboard. But then I realized that my processor is socket 478, which I guess is also out-of-date, and there probably aren't any socket 478 motherboards with any PCI Express slots, or even two AGP slots.

So my two choices are to get a new graphics card, a new motherboard and a new processor, something I'd really like to avoid doing all at once, or to just get a better AGP card and forget about bridging two cards.

The main thing I want to know is this: is SLI worth it? Would my performance be better off with two similar cards than with one really good one?

My current specs are:

NVidia GeForce 7600 GS
ABIT IC-7 Motherboard
socket 478 Pentium 4, 3.40 GHz
1.50 GB RAM (2x 256MB + 2x 512MB)

I've also got an NVidia GeForce FX 5500 AGP card laying around that I originally thought I would be able to bridge with my current one, but that's out of the question now, I guess.

Thanks in advance for any help, tips or suggestions.

 

Yeah, SLI is PCI X exclusive. You would basically need a whole new system to get it done and that includes some new RAM since DDR2 is the standard for boards now. You are right, you are in a bit of a pickle because you don't want to drop too much in your current rig, but you can't yet get a new system, yet you want to do some serious gaming. You could go out and get a beast of an AGP card, but you would be dropping $ on this system. Also, I am betting your board supports AGP 4x (rather than 8x) which will slow things down more.

Is SLI worth it. In my opinion yes. Benchmarks have shown that the biggest impact in regard to gaming is adding that second card. The cards are beasts to begin with, but adding that second one really puts you over the edge. You would be looking at starting from scratch though. Think new everything- PSU, mobo, RAM, vid cards, ect. Here is a link that gives you more info on SLI. I linked you to the page that shows some of the benchmarking and how SLI is the best upgrade when gaming is concerned.

http://www.slizone.com/page/slizone_learn.html

You could build a budget SLI rig. ECS has a great board in the $80 range and you could start with 1 card (still more than sufficient) with an eye towards an upgrade. But remember, SLI is going to require a good PSU.

 

Okay, thanks a lot for your help. In the end I ended up ordering a pretty hefty Dell XPS; I figured I'd go all out and get something I won't need to touch in the matter of upgrades for a few years, rather than getting a decent PC and slowly upgrade it until I hit a point like this again, where I just can't upgrade it anymore.

Thanks again for your input. It helped a lot.

 

Nooooooooooo! If I would have known you were ready to drop some $$$$ I would have helped recommend components to build a BEAST SLI rig!!!! Whyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy! You always pay more and get less when you buy from a manufacturer.:cry

I do hope you like the Dell though. If it doesn't work out and you return it somehow, come back to me my friend. I think we can build a MONSTER!!:major

 

Hahaha, well, I wanted to buy it and get it over with. It's awesome having a computer that you've built with your own two hands, but sometimes I just don't want to deal with it and the problems it might present me.

And sometimes, buying from a manufacturer is actually cheaper, just because they get great deals from places like NVidia and Pentium for buying things in bulk; Dell and the like will buy hundreds of the same part at once and get a huge discount.

But yeah, I figured I'd rather just get it done in one swipe instead of turning it into another project that might drone on. And if something goes wrong, which, when it comes to me building a computer, is less likely from a manufacturer, I can blame it on them and make them fix it, which is nice.

Thanks again for the help though, and I'll be sure to come back here if I've changed my mind!