970 SLI Compatibility

[Steven Gibb]

With the price of GPUs being a touch on the expensive side right now I'm considering adding another pre-owned one as a temporary boost to my system .
I currently have an EVGA 970 SC acx 2.0 and have seen an FTW edition at a decent price and was wondering if the 2 would match up nicely in SLI.
I understand they have marginally different clock speeds which I'm led to believe isn't an issue as the FTW version will downclock slightly to match the SC,is this correct ?
Any help here would be appreciated.
Cheers guys.

 

[clutchc]

Correct on the clock speed. If your board has SLI capability and the 2nd PCIe x16 slot is at least x8 lanes wide and your PSU can handle it and your CPU has the performance, you should be fine. Nvidia has done a pretty good job of eliminating SLI stutter that used to plague dual cards. But you may still have issues with some games that refuse to play nice with SLI.

 

[drbones8472]

As long as they are fairly close in clock speeds and not massively different, there shouldn't be an issues.

 

[bignastyid]

Not all of Evga's 970s are SLI compatible with other 970s not even other Evga 970s.
https://www.evga.com/support/faq/afmviewfaq.aspx?faqid=59534

 

[Steven Gibb]

Thank you for your swift replies guys.
I have actually seen that compatibility table and honestly I'm none the wiser as it doesn't show the SC model just the sac.

 

[richiestang_78]

Keep in mind performance gains in gaming using SLI is very rare. Most games don't support it and the ones that do alot support it badly and you'll be finding you will be keeping SLI disabled a lot of the times for better performance.

 

[drbones8472]

Keep in mind performance gains in gaming using SLI is very rare. Most games don't support it and the ones that do alot support it badly and you'll be finding you will be keeping SLI disabled a lot of the times for better performance.

SLI is not a "Very Rare" thing. Most games that come out now actually have SLI support. Its actually gotten to the point where more games support SLI then don't, and no I am not talking about $$15-$20 Indy games. I mean most modern AAA titles have SLI support. Now, they may not have it at launch, but ussualy within a couple weeks or so there is a driver release that has makes it SLI compatible. ive had an SLI setup since the good old days of the 680's and SLI support has done nothing but get better and better. Hell even Crossfire support has gotten better.

 

[richiestang_78]

SLI games are about 10-15% of the market, and in many cases performance is the same under 1 card or even slightly worse using it. Theres plenty of benchmarks with SLI games showing this to be true.