Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Founders Edition, Unboxed

[mapesdhs]

That level of gaming will still be a niche market, despite the high margins. Just look at the predicted cost of the monitor.

It irks far more that SLi/CF are being pushed aside, especially SLI as it did used to work rather well (I had way more issues using CF, and DX9 support was never fixed despite promises). These methods were an ideal way to gain access to higher average fps at the expense of other factors for those who couldn't afford top-end models of the day. I went through quite a few SLI configs from the 8800GT to 580 3GB before finally adopting a single card (980) after reading how games companies and NVIDIA were slowly ditching support for the tech.

I've also seen tech sites state SLI is not supported anymore, or not beyond 2 GPUs, which isn't true. Why has NVIDIA's pointless lockout (which needs a code to get past but is nevertheless available) been converted into saying it's not supported at all? Seems like tech review sites are happy to go along with this shift, whereas years ago there was always praise for the choice SLI/CF offered to those on more limited budgets.

Ian.

 

[Th3pwn3r]

It amazes me how SLI started with bugs and still has lots of bugs. I erased the idea of SLI in my head ages ago after my friends and I all had pretty bad experiences/results with it. Too many things that can go wrong and they do. The performance isn't worth the extreme unreliability.

 

[mapesdhs]

My experiences were never that bad, and I used it for a loooong time. CF was worse though, especially for DX9. Until I moved up to a single good card (only because I was able to sell the two old cards for quite a lot to a company), I'd gone through the following combinations:

8800GT 512MB SLI
GTX 460 1GB SLI
GTX 560 1GB SLI
GTX 560 Ti 1GB SLI
GTX 580 1.5GB SLI
GTX 580 3GB SLI

Maybe it depends on the game, but I had little trouble with the titles I was playing. True though that in more recent years there seem to be a greater number of borks introduced with driver updates. I stuck for quite a while with 314.22 because of this.

Ian.

 

[FormatC]

In the table you mislabeled memory bandwidth in MB/s instead of GB/s.
Unless you're telling me a Pentium 3 with PC133 RAM has double the memory bandwidth of a GTX 1080Ti

Don't underestimate the good old Pentiums! But Fixed

 

[mapesdhs]

Don't underestimate the good old Pentiums! But Fixed

I was going to test 3-way GTX 980 SLI with a P4/3.4 (ASUS Striker II Extreme) just for the giggles, but the poor thing can't even cope with 2-way GTX 460 SLI.

Ian.

 

[FormatC]

One of my older Retro-reviews:

Which CPU(s) were faster? 2 x PIII 800 MHz on a Tyan Tiger 133 "S1834" vs. Phenom 2 X3 720 BE (@800 Mhz, 2 cores activated)
http://www.tomshardware.de/Spiele-Performance-Windows-DirectX,testberichte-240395-12.html