Anyone have any Experience going in and out of SLI

[Magankan]

Hola All,
I was wondering if anyone had any experience with a particular problem in SLI configurations...running dual monitors. I have read that there are roughly three options for running dual monitors in an SLI rig. One, buying a dual monitor card, Two, buying a third graphics card, albeit, a low end one that can run on your system effectively, and lastly, to turn SLI off in the nvidia settings program. As far as these options go, I would like for people to post their experiences with just turning off the SLI when playing wow, and running a second monitor. Problems, perks, etc. Here are my rig specs,

Q6600 processor
Evga 680i A-1 rev mobo
150GB raptor 10k drive
400GB 7.2k drive
4GB 800MHz dominator mem
dual 8800GT GPUs in SLI
64bit vista

[Xzin]

Despite having the correct motherboard and 3x 8800GTXes, I can't even run SLI. At all. Even with the latest drivers.

If I downgrade to Vista, I could do triple SLI. But not on 2 monitors.

But all told, I could 5 box with 2560 x 1600. Would SLI work like that, 5 windows rather than one full screen? Not sure.

[Magankan]

I was looking to start with a 3-box, or even a 2-box, til I can get the kinks out and my mind wrapped around playing all the toons, but I have this extra 19" Dell LCD from my old computer just sitting here, so thought I might be able to use it once I get the hang of all this.

I was planning to have my main on my new monitor and run a my other toons from the second. I had two reasons for this. One, I wanted to have an independent set-up for when I raid. just having my computer run how it normally would. Second, space would be good to see everything on the main screen. Seems like playing more than one toon on one screen would be awfully distracting. Still reading up on all the logistics and such, but I am pretty excited to start doing this. Been wanting to try Boxing for over a year now, but my old comp really was not good for running multiple Instances, let alone one,lol.

You running XP? I figured you'd be running 2 in sli and the third for your second monitor, but I just recently found out about Tri-SLI video set-ups, that seems crazy powerful to me,lol

[Xzin]

There is a long known bug in the 8800 drivers that disables SLI if you have more than 4 monitors plugged in.

[aetherg]

I have a 7800 SLI setup. As you said, the drivers do not allow multiple monitors when in SLI mode; there's no way around it. Disabling SLI works fine; there shouldn't be any problems caused by it. I've been running with 2-3 monitors for more than a year with SLI disabled

To be honest, I was really disappointed in SLI overall. The performance boost was not huge, even in games really designed for it (Source engine). In fact, especially in WoW, I would notice a slight but ugly 'ripple' in the screen, caused by the way SLI interlaces the lines. It's better to buy a single nice graphics card, and use the money you save to buy a better one in a year or two.

[Magankan]

yeah, I know WoW doesn't really utilize the power of higher end cards. I would imagine because of such a large and spread out demographic that they need to allow for all types of computer user. I wanted to make sure, when I bought my new comp, that WoW would at least function with a new 8800 card. Would have kinda sucked to get a GPU set up, that will last me for awhile, and then not be able to play my favorite game,lol.

I haven't recieved my new comp yet, but there are times that I wish I had just gotten a 8800GTX instead of dual GT cards. I plan on doing a bunch of video editing and stuff with this pc, so I got the dual cards. Who knows, if the new generation of cards are as good as they claim, I may get one and run it solo in about a year.