[SOLVED] 980Ti SLi on Z590 chip MoBo

Jun 27, 2021
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So its been 6 years since my last pc build. A lot has changed since, including me finding out nvidia no longer supports SLI. Which sucks cause 3080 are impossible to get still and i got 2 x 980TI i use to run on my old motherboard. I already i5-11600k and was looking at mobos on PcPicker. I was confused when it only offered 2 compatible mobo and they were z490s. I went to new egg and found a bunch of z590 lga 1200 mobo so i was wondering why PcPicker was filtering everything out. Turns out it was because i have SLI gpu setup and I didnt know most newer motherboard no longer offer SLI. After doing some research into this I think its still possible to do SLI as long as the board has a minium of 2 x8 pcie slots. Which most baord has 2 x16. The one im looking at has 1 x16 pcie 4.0 and 1 x16 pcie 3.0 and 1 x4 pcie 3.0. Would thay work for a SLI setup + nvme m.2 SSD? The i5 11600k support 20 pcie lanes so x8 + x8 for the 2 gpu and +4 for the m.2 SSD. I honestly dont know enough about how pcie bus lanes work. So if someone could confirm that the setup can work, that would be great.

Specific part:

Cpu: i5-11600k
Mobo: Gigabyte Z590 Aorus Elite AX LGA1200
Gpu: SLI 2x 980Ti
 
Solution
Windows 10 is mgpu based, not sli/CF based, and is DX12 native. The only titles that might support sli are anything DX11, and mostly older titles. Nvidia got away from sli when a single card could easily surpass the fps requirements of games and cpus. Pretty much nothing a 980ti can't handle at 1080p ultra and still get very playable fps.

So, yeah, consider sli support effectively dead. Older games aren't getting any sli updates or bug fixes or optimizations, and new stuff is now DX12 mostly. Hopefully gpu prices will start dropping, demand going down, soon, but that'll mean a flood of used miner gpus on the used market, so selling at least 1 of the pair soon will net a better profit.

Karadjgne

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Windows 10 is mgpu based, not sli/CF based, and is DX12 native. The only titles that might support sli are anything DX11, and mostly older titles. Nvidia got away from sli when a single card could easily surpass the fps requirements of games and cpus. Pretty much nothing a 980ti can't handle at 1080p ultra and still get very playable fps.

So, yeah, consider sli support effectively dead. Older games aren't getting any sli updates or bug fixes or optimizations, and new stuff is now DX12 mostly. Hopefully gpu prices will start dropping, demand going down, soon, but that'll mean a flood of used miner gpus on the used market, so selling at least 1 of the pair soon will net a better profit.
 
Solution
Jun 27, 2021
6
1
15
For everyone telling me to sell the 2nd GPU since new game wont support SLI. That isnt the point, i onky play one game and that game does support SLI. And FPS js very important in the game so right now i like to get the most frame possible.
 
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Karadjgne

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Nvidia has canceled support to the Z590 mobo's. If you use older drivers intended for Z490 and prior DX11, it might work, but you'd need to use really old drivers in order to get the control panel up before updating to anything newer.

But here's the gimmick. Fps is an aspect of the cpu, Not the gpu. Gpu is all about eye-candy, the levels of details and shadows etc. It takes a certain amount of time for a cpu to compose a frame, it has to place every object, deal with Ai, dimensions, vectors, motion etc. The amount of times a frame can be fully composed by the cpu in one second is your fps limit.

From there, the frames get sent to the gpu. The amount of times a gpu can wire frame that cpu data and finish render according to resolution and detail settings is on-screen fps.

So if your old board + cpu got you 60fps, the most the sli could get you is 60fps. Upgrading to a stronger, faster, higher IPC cpu like the 11600k, that's going to raise fps potential. Your limit might be 100fps now. The question being if a single 980ti can render that amount of fps at playable details or if you'll need the sli in order to maintain the detail levels at higher fps.

There's very few games from that rough generation that required sli 980ti to get playable frames, especially on resolutions that were popular back then such as 1080p/1440p. Even games such as CSGO don't have any real benefit to higher fps once minimum frames are past monitor refresh.
 
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Joseph_138

Distinguished
SLi is considered dead technology. It won't be supported in future games, or in future drivers. You're better off to sell one of your 980ti's now, while you can get a good price for it, and use that money later to buy a newer card when the prices come back down. That's why people are advising you to sell one of your cards now. Now that NVidia has dropped GeForce 600 and 700 from driver support, 900 is next. You may only have another year of support before they are dropped, too. It makes more sense right now, to get what you can for the 900 series cards and get a newer one that will still be in support for a while yet, and will give the same performance as the SLi setup in a single card.
 
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