Re: [gentoo-user] nvidia w/ water cooling?

["Richard Fish" <bigfish@asmallpond.org>]

On 11/20/06, Jerry McBride <mcbrides9@comcast.net> wrote:
> Would you know if  there are any gotcha's with using SLI video cards?

Hmm, don't know.  I know that nVidia's README says that multiple
monitors and a couple of other features do not work with SLI enabled.
But I guess I would trust these guys when they say that linux users
get no benefits from SLI:

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=582&num=1

Honestly, if I were putting dual graphics boards in my system for
linux, I'd probably want to hook 4 nice monitors up to it and make a
*really* big desktop.

> It seems
> this is getting harder and harder to avoid with current motherboards... From
> what I understan (yuk yuk) the SLI video looks just like AGP cards. Sound
> right?

I'm not sure what you mean here?  Did you confuse PCI-Express (PCIe) and SLI?

It is getting very hard to find (new) boards that support AGP
graphics, but you probably really want PCIe anyway in a new system.
There is not any really significant difference between AGP and PCIe
busses for linux.

In addition, many motherboards have dual PCIe-x16 slots to support two
graphics boards, and also support SLI for linking the boards together.
 But none of these boards require SLI to be used...they work perfectly
well with a single graphics board, and you can even use the other
PCIe-x16 slot for something else.

-Richard
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