How to connect nvidia gtx 680 series#

if you are familiar with the hardware developments over the past decade you'll remember that 3dfx had a very familiar concept with the Voodoo 2 graphics cards series. Multi GPU rendering - the idea is not new at all. Screenshot of two cards with SLI enabled on the NVIDIA control panel. Then install/update the drivers, after which most games can take advantage of the extra horsepower we just added into the system. Once we seat the similar graphics cards on the carefully selected motherboard we just bridge them together with a supplied Crossfire connector or, in NVIDIA's case, an SLI connector.

How to connect nvidia gtx 680 series#

A small note, if you are on an AMD processor then on AMD's side the 900 series chipset supports SLI as well.

If your motherboard does not have the SLI certification mentioned on the box, it's likely not SLI compatible.

An SLI certified motherboard is an nForce motherboard with more than two PCIe x16 slots or a certified P55, P67, Z68, X58 or a Z77 motherboard.

A Crossfire compatible motherboard is pretty much ANY motherboard with multiple PCIe x16 slots that is not an nForceВ motherboard.

So along these lines, you could for example place two or more ATI graphics cards into a Crossfire compatible motherboard, or two or more NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards in SLI mode on a compatible motherboard. One card can do the job sufficiently, but withВ two or more you can achieve much more. That's roughly the same idea for graphics cards. One horse will get the job done yet by adding a second or third horse, you'll plough through that farmland much quicker and (hopefully) more efficiently as the weight of that plough is distributed much more evenly. Think of a farmer with a plough and one horse. The more GPUs, the worse the scaling becomes though, two GPUs in most scenarios is ideal. This way you effectively try to double, triple or even quadruple your raw rendering gaming performance (in theory). Both NVIDIA's SLI and AMD's ATI Crossfire allow you to combine/add a second or even third similar generation graphics card (or add in more GPUs) to the one you already have in your PC.