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Originally Posted by BurntToast
Actually the first thing that I noticed is that you are buying a PCI-E board and an AGP video card.
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I didn't even realize the X850XT came in AGP. I assumed it was PCI-E. Oops.
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Originally Posted by BurntToast
Also, again as far as I am aware, you cannot run ATI's Crossfire setup in a SLI board. You would have to buy a Crossfire specific board. However a SLI board is a good investment if you buy a good card that is SLI compatible. It will run fine with just one vid card and then a few years down the road when the machine is starting to have trouble running the newest games... you could just buy a second vid card and viola... be back near the top again.
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Yeah, you're right about the Crossfire. I read it wrong the first time. I thought the technologoy was built into the card, not the board. You know, like it should be.
As far as the SLI board being a good investment, I still disagree. SLI is still not a very well supported technology. To truly take advantage of it, you need two
exactly identical cards. If you only buy one card now, two years down the road the chances of you finding the
exact same version of that exact card are very, very slight.
Even when you have two cards in SLI, very few games run perfectly. There are often artifacts and other problems associated with the multiple GPUs. Besides which, a single 7800 still outperforms two 6800s in SLI. Right now, it's much more cost effective to just get a better card, rather than try to do SLI. Maybe in a few years if the support is there it will be worth it to do SLI, but not now. Or so I think.
Example: You could try running SLI. To do so, you would need an SLI board... say, $150 at the least. Then you would need two cards. We'll say two 6800 Ultras. $450 apiece. So you're looking at just over a grand to do an SLI setup.
Alternatively, you could go with a less expensive motherboard with only a single PCI-Ex16 slot. Say, $100. Then just get a better card, say the 7800 GTX. You only pay $500 for that card, but a single 7800 GTX outperforms two 6800 Ultras in SLI. Call me crazy, but I'd rather pay $600 for better performance than paying $1000.
Also, assuming you
did go the route of getting an SLI capable board and waiting a few years to grab another card. You would pay about $600 upfront for that setup anyway, and then you'd have to buy a second card down the road. Why not just get the better $600 setup now and be done with it?