Want to run EVGA GTX 980 Ti SC in SLI

[whitelion1284]

Hey all,

so a couple years ago I bought a EVGA GeForce GTX 980 Ti Superclocked Graphics Card. I am now planning to purchase a second to run in SLI with the first but am having trouble identifying the exact card that I currently have and was wondering just how exactly the second card needs to match the first. Do they need to be absolutely identical? Can anyone provide me with a layman's education?

Thanks for your time and attention.
Cheers

 

[jaslion]

Hey all,

so a couple years ago I bought a EVGA GeForce GTX 980 Ti Superclocked Graphics Card. I am now planning to purchase a second to run in SLI with the first but am having trouble identifying the exact card that I currently have and was wondering just how exactly the second card needs to match the first. Do they need to be absolutely identical? Can anyone provide me with a layman's education?

Thanks for your time and attention.
Cheers

Best idea is to sell your 980ti and get a 1080 or 1080ti. Barely any game has sli support anymore. The few that do have it have it implemented pretty badly where it just doesn't work, barely gives you anything extra or even lowers the performance for the most part.

 

[WildCard999]

The card doesn't need to be identical, just needs to be a 980 ti, however the speed of the card is determined by the slower card but usually that doesn't make a huge difference and typically an overclock can fix it. Unless you getting it for cheap I just wanted to let you know that coming from someone who was using SLI from 2014 until about 3 weeks ago support for SLI isn't as much as it used to be and you may not experience any improvements (& sometimes poorer performance) on a SLI setup.

 

[10tacle]

Well I had EVGA GTX 970s in SLI. Not all EVGA 970 models were SLI capable. EVGA has a list showing which 970 models are and are not SLI compatible ( https://www.evga.com/support/faq/afmviewfaq.aspx?faqid=59534 ). I learned the hard way after initially buying an SC model with the blower cooler and then a year later an SSC model with the ACX 2.0+ cooler. Little did I know they were not SLI compatible.

EVGA would not specifically say why, but my guess is that the GPUs had different BIOSs (the newer GPU had a dual BIOS). Not sure about EVGA's 980Ti models, so you may need to get on their forums and ask or search around. I wound up selling my SC model and buying another SSC.

With all that said, I recently sold my 970s and upgraded to a 1080Ti (thanks to the mining craze, the value of the used 970s has gone up over the months). I likely will never again have SLI as game developers are slowly backing away from it. I'm seeing more and more games released with poor SLI scaling or no initial SLI support at all. I'm also enjoying the less power draw and heat output.

 

[Deleted member 217926]

Your best bet as stated above is to sell that card while it still has some value ( ~$300-$350 ) and get a single, more powerful card. A 1080 if you play at 1440p or a 1080 Ti at 4K. As also stated above multi GPU support has always been hit or miss and it's barely supported at all in newer games.

Other issues, way more power consumption and heat.

I have an EVGA 980 Ti SC ACX 2.0+ and a 60Hz, 1440p monitor. I still can't justify an upgrade as I get playable frame rates in everything with max image quality settings.