Question Can I use two different graphics cards at the same time

[thirumalai94]

I have GTX 1060 3GB graphics card, this I recently bought. I am going to buy one motherboard which has two graphics card slots. I already have one old graphics card which is "GT 610 2GB"

So, if I can combine both GTX 1060 and GT 610, will it give me more graphics memory (3GB + 2GB = 5GB) ?

In case if this combination is not possible, can I combine some good graphics card like GTX 1080 or higher variant with my GTX 1060 3GB graphics card

so that I will get some good Video memory.

I went through some websites which are telling GTX 1060 is not SLI compatible. If so, Is there any other way I can use?

 

[korv]

You cannot use them at the same time but you can use them for two monitors. You won't really get 5 vram combined, you'll get just 3 gb since both of them aren't in sli or nvlink.

 

[4745454b]

Why is combining the memory important? Usually people want to combine the cores so they get more power/frames per second. You seem to be worried about the memory so I'm wondering why.

None of the cards you listed are SLI capable. You also need identical cards for that to work. If you buy a 1080, you'll need another 1080 to use SLI. You are best off just using your best video card and not worrying about adding extra cards in.

 

[drea.drechsler]

I have GTX 1060 3GB graphics card, this I recently bought. I am going to buy one motherboard which has two graphics card slots. I already have one old graphics card which is "GT 610 2GB"

So, if I can combine both GTX 1060 and GT 610, will it give me more graphics memory (3GB + 2GB = 5GB) ?

In case if this combination is not possible, can I combine some good graphics card like GTX 1080 or higher variant with my GTX 1060 3GB graphics card

so that I will get some good Video memory.

I went through some websites which are telling GTX 1060 is not SLI compatible. If so, Is there any other way I can use?

Yes you can if you have the PCIe slots to hold both. Plug a different monitor into each display and Windows makes it easy to set it up as a dual-display system...either spreading the desktop across the two displays, duplicating the 'desktop' on both or putting a different desktop on each one. In that way the activity on one won't impact the activity going on on the other one. The CPU will still be impacted, however. Just be aware that driver installs to support each card can be a bit dicey.

But you can not use a second Nvidia card to help another one by 'adding' it's memory or otherwise gaining GPU performance for a game unless they meet all the requirements for 'SLI'. I believe the first one is they built to be SLI capable, as you found out. Even then, it only works in select games and performance improvement was never all that earth shattering.

 

[korv]

Of course you can use them in two monitors. i was talking about one.

 

[drea.drechsler]

Of course you can use them in two monitors. i was talking about one.

Yeah well...nope. Doesn't do that.

Even if it could just imagine what that would mean: memory accesses across the PCIe bus would have to be laggy. Probably as laggy as accesses to main memory which is what happens when local (on the card) memory runs out. So really, no benefit to doing it.