SLI worth it now?

I was talking to my friend on how a 8600 would be stronger then 2 7900 gs running together on 8x8x sli. He couldnt understand when ur card is running at 16x(single) it gets chopped in half 8x8x in sli. So your cards are basically running as 1 but as fast as 1 7900gs in 16x. I told him the only thing ur gaining is the memory. So you double up on ur memory so 256.256 = 512 for higher resolutions.

Now, I didnt know when I bought that motherboard A8N-SLI that nvidia tried to lie to gamers saying u get 2 full cards. Well, now Im seeing alot more 680i motherboards supporting 16x16x sli.

My question : The motherboards now are at 16x16x instead of 8x8x. Before with 8x8x it wasnt worth sli. Now you can get 16x16x which means both cards are gonna get both bandwiths at 16x?

So if I had a 8800 running at 600 core it ll be basically 1200 core? and 2000 memory basically together at 4000 memory? I hope this is true u know? Crysis is gonna need alot of power to run.

 

not entierly correct. SLI doesnt double performance, it just splits the load between the two cards. for example, 2 horses pulling something will be easier than just the one hose but it doesnt mean it will move twice as fast.

honestly, i think that 2x 7900GS would beat an 8600. actually, im sure of it. The 8600 isnt THAT powerful of a card. Id say its the equivalent of the 7600GT in the 7XXX series cards (not directly comparing the two though)

as far as the 8x and 16x goes, pretty much no card can saturate the PCI-E bandwidth at 16x (maybe the 8800Ultra/GTX). There wouldnt be too much of a difference between cards running at 8x SLI and full 16x SLI. I'll see if I can find some benchmarks for you.

ok I found one: http://www.tbreak.com/reviews/article.php?cat=mobos&id=436&pagenumber=2

as u can see there is a very marginal difference between the two. Though, I can see the PCI-E bus possibly getting overloaded in the near future with these crazy powerful cards coming out.

hopefully this clears things up for ya