Legit Reviews

I was wondering if it would be OK to have 2 cards made by different manufacturers in SLI?

I have a BFG 7600GT OC and i was thinking about buying a Point of View 7600GT (not OC) and make use of my SLI motherboard. The thing is i am unsure if they will work properly. The BFG card i have is an OC version, the clocks aren't that much better than stock, 580 instead of 560 and 1450 instead of 1400. I am wondering if this would cause a problem, or would i just have to turn the clocks down a bit on the BFG card or maybe turn the clocks up on the POV card?

Some of you might be thinking, 'just get another BFG card'. To that i would say the BFG card costs over £30 more than the POV card and to be honest if i were to start again i wouldn't buy another 7600GT. So the only reason i am considering this is because i can get another 7600GT for just over £50, and for that i think it might be worth it.

If anyone has an SLI setup with 2 different manufacturers let me know if you had any problems. And i would ask anyone that has or had 2 7600GT's in SLI, how did they perform compared to one and did you try them with Battlefield 2?

You can SLI different brands and clock speeds no problem.

you can basically. sli anything. a 6600 and a 7900, could be sli'ed its that its not recomended because a 7900 alone is faster. reason being is that the 2 cards will try to find a median in clock speeds. so it would slow down the 7900 to a 6600 speed. but to answer your question yes you can sli them.

Thanks for the replies,

As for SLI'ing anything, i seriously doubt that. You need 2 identical GPU's for SLI, so you can't SLI a 6600 and a 7900, that simply wouldn't work no way, slower clocks or not.

Solinari wrote:Thanks for the replies,

As for SLI'ing anything, i seriously doubt that. You need 2 identical GPU's for SLI, so you can't SLI a 6600 and a 7900, that simply wouldn't work no way, slower clocks or not.

Solinari is correct, in order to SLI two video cards they must have the same GPU. Its also best to have the same amount of memory on the video card to make it easier on yourself. As for the speeds that is not as important because when you SLI two video cards of different speeds the faster card will automatically slowdown to match the speed of the slower card.


XFX Support

Thanks for that reply XFX Support, glad to know it will work. When i planned on getting the other 7600GT it was taking in to account a discount, now that discount is no longer available i am unsure whether or not it would be worth it.

"As for the speeds that is not as important because when you SLI two video cards of different speeds the faster card will automatically slowdown to match the speed of the slower card."

Is this something that's new? Because I know that I had more than 1 NForce 4 SLI motherboard and when you used cards with different clocks the clock speeds used in SLI depended on which card was in which slot. ie I had an EVGA 7800GT @470mhz and a BFG 7800GT @425mhz when the EVGA card was in the top slot the BFG card was overclocked to the EVGA speeds and when it was the BFG card in the top slot the EVGA card was underclocked to the BFG speeds. I could almost swear to it that it was the same when I tried it with this 680i LT but I could be wrong... I didn't pay much attention the one time I tried it. I'll have another 8800GT soon to retry it though.