[SOLVED] dual cards

[2g33k4u]

I have an Asus RoG Strix b550-f Mobo Ryzen 9 3900 128gb DDR 2TB Sabrient Gen 4
I have a Zotac GTX 1060 card it is in the 32x slot
The Mobo Manual says it can support a second card but then both cards would run at 16x.
I have 3 screens and was thinking Use 1 card for the side screens and the other card for the center screen. Would I see Substantial improvement? or would I see degradation from 2 @ 16x.

 

[bignastyid]

32X? No such thing as a 32x pci-e slot.
Your motherboard has 1 16x pci-e 4.0 slot, 1 16x pci-e 3.0 slot and 3 1x pci-e 3.0 slots that only runs at 4x speeds.
Adding a 2nd gpu for your other monitors will off load resource usage from the primary card, but unless you are running something on them that is taking alot of gpu resources you likely won't see much if any performance gain.

 

[2g33k4u]

Thank you

 

[TommyTwoTone66]

Your Zotac 1060 already has 5 monitor outputs and can support up to 5 screens.

If you were to add a second card in SLI, you would still only use one of the cards' monitor outputs since that's how SLI works. The second card just acts as a secondary processor for the first one, it doesn't and cannot split the workload per monitor as you're suggesting.

If you use 2 Nvidia cards in SLI, you would need to install the special SLI drivers to make them work. Often, these give worse performance in games and 2D applications than just using one card and the standard drivers. This is because the standard drivers are far better tested, optimised and bug-fixed than the SLI drivers ever are. This is the same with AMD Crossfire as well.

Crashes, glitches, stutters and weird visual bugs are way, way more common with the SLI drivers than the standard drivers, and any performance gain you get only comes in games, and only in games which actually support SLI, which isn't that many.

 

[bignastyid]

Your Zotac 1060 already has 5 monitor outputs and can support up to 5 screens.

If you were to add a second card in SLI, you would still only use one of the cards' monitor outputs since that's how SLI works. The second card just acts as a secondary processor for the first one, it doesn't and cannot split the workload per monitor as you're suggesting.

If you use 2 Nvidia cards in SLI, you would need to install the special SLI drivers to make them work. Often, these give worse performance in games and 2D applications than just using one card and the standard drivers. This is because the standard drivers are far better tested, optimised and bug-fixed than the SLI drivers ever are. This is the same with AMD Crossfire as well.

Crashes, glitches, stutters and weird visual bugs are way, way more common with the SLI drivers than the standard drivers, and any performance gain you get only comes in games, and only in games which actually support SLI, which isn't that many.

SLI is kind of a moot point. The GTX 1060 doesn't support SLI and neither does the motherboard.

 

[TommyTwoTone66]

SLI is kind of a moot point. The GTX 1060 doesn't support SLI and neither does the motherboard.

Very good point. I didn't notice but that motherboard only supports AMD Crossfire. So if you did want to run two graphics cards (which is still a terribly bad idea), it would have to be two AMD cards.

 

[DSzymborski]

Even if you just wanted to use a second GPU to drive the side monitors rather than the GPUs working together, there's no real point here; using Windows is just about meaningless for a GPU in terms of workload. Any money used to buy a second GPU could be put to far better use in a billion places.

 

[2g33k4u]

I was looking to lower the workload on the card running the Game screen by removing 2 of the screens from the equation and offload them to another card. Wasn't looking at it from an SLI perspective. This is for my Star Citizen Game.

 

[DSzymborski]

I was looking to lower the workload on the card running the Game screen by removing 2 of the screens from the equation and offload them to another card. Wasn't looking at it from an SLI perspective. This is for my Star Citizen Game.

What are the other screens doing? If you're just surfing the web on the other screens, it's not offloading anything meaningful. It would be a bit like renting a truck to move a couch and a pie and then deciding to rent a second truck just for the pie to make it easier on the truck moving the couch. The pie doesn't make a difference. Neither does Windows.

 

[2g33k4u]

What are the other screens doing? If you're just surfing the web on the other screens, it's not offloading anything meaningful. It would be a bit like renting a truck to move a couch and a pie and then deciding to rent a second truck just for the pie to make it easier on the truck moving the couch. The pie doesn't make a difference. Neither does Windows.

That's funny but makes sense.

 

[wyliec2]

What are the other screens doing? If you're just surfing the web on the other screens, it's not offloading anything meaningful. It would be a bit like renting a truck to move a couch and a pie and then deciding to rent a second truck just for the pie to make it easier on the truck moving the couch. The pie doesn't make a difference. Neither does Windows.

I appreciate a good analogy!!

 

[TommyTwoTone66]

I was looking to lower the workload on the card running the Game screen by removing 2 of the screens from the equation and offload them to another card. Wasn't looking at it from an SLI perspective. This is for my Star Citizen Game.

This isn’t possible. Unless you use SLI, then Windows will only work on one of the GPUs. You can put a second Nvidia GPU in your machine, but you could only use it for non-display CUDA tasks, e.g. Bitcoin mining.