Is it worth adding a non sli 3rd card to my sli pair

[DrDinger]

Hi,

I'm running a gigabyte z97x gaming 5 with a i7 4770k and 2x GeForce 980s in sli. My motherboard supports 1 x 16 pcie lanes, 2 x 8 lanes or 1 x 8 and 2 x 4 lanes.

If I put another old card into the third pci slot for physics would that speed up gaming or slow it down because the second sli card will only be on 4 x lanes?

Thanks,

Dinger.

 

[panathas]

No, it doesn't worth it. The gains you may see are pretty minimal and in specific few games while you may even experience a performance decrease in all the other games. Physics acceleration doesn't play such a big role in today's games and your current GPUs are more than capable of handling that task. On the other hand if you add a third card your system will be consuming more power all the time and you may see a small performance increase on 1-2 games, but you may also see a performance decrease in all the other games that don't use physics acceleration. If do you want more graphics power you should consider getting a new GPU. One single GTX 1080 should be better than what you have, if we consider the inefficient SLI scaling and it will be a lot faster in games that don't support SLI. On the other hand the GTX 1080ti and the RTX 2080 are way faster (2-3x) than what you have and consume a lot less power. Good luck.