on september 17th 2020 claimed yet another victim now NVIDIA's sli
technology which allows you to use more than one graphics card to increase your
FPS in games was already on life support with
lackluster support from game developers and NVIDIA slowly pulling support from
more and more of their cards but the final nail in the coffin was of
course this blog post on NVIDIA's website stating that they would no
longer develop sli profiles for future cards at all or for their past cards
past january of 2021 curiously though the rtx 3090 NVIDIA's
latest and absolute greatest does have an nv-link connector which as
of last generation is the connector that we use for sli
which hasn't been explicitly disabled so
theoretically in the handful of games that do natively support it we should be
able to run sli on this card
raising the question of course given how CPU bottlenecked this is on any kind of
mere mortal monitor will a second rtx 3090 even make any difference i
legitimately don't know i have intentionally cloistered myself and not
looked at anyone else's videos on the subject
just like i haven't looked at who's our sponsor
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as much as i would have loved to throw two of NVIDIA's chungus founders edition
rtx 3090s in here and see just how well
this through card blowy thing works when you've got two of
them stacked on top of each other i wasn't able to get another one of those
so we're going with ASUS rog strix gaming rtx 3090 now i don't actually
know much about this card other than that ASUS did apparently manage to dodge
the whole fiasco with like bad board components causing crashes and stuff
like that so uh good job jesus
you're done good oh she's a heavy boy for sure so we've got
a three fan configuration with counterflow so that's that this one is
spinning clockwise the others are spinning counterclockwise something something turbulence we actually do oh
that's interesting we do have a little bit of through the card blowiness here
sort of it's a much more traditionally shaped pcb but the cooler actually
extends for a that looks like a good couple of inches past the edge of the
card now you might have noticed i didn't take the plastic peels off this one
that's because this one's got to go back to ASUS funny story they were like
uh hey be real careful with that one because it's literally the only one we
have and we have to do some stuff with it you know the product is in shortage
when even the manufacturer does not have any fun fact about our system configuration
here the MSI z490 godlike was literally
the only motherboard in our studio that was capable of handling this
configuration not because we didn't have any other
boards with four slot spacing which is what we need at least in order to have
any room for the top card to breathe but because it was the only Intel based one
that had that and trust me i love ryzen as much as anyone
does at this point but if you're running two rtx 3090s you are going to need the
fastest possible gaming CPU which for now anyway is the 10900k this is
freaking nuts like look at this the whole the whole
bottom of the case is full of graphics i love that these fans are
going to be blowing right into this bottom card this one
good shape for cooling this one
well might be okay
it's not really the best case for this but we're just gonna leave it open so it gets enough
air flow uh hey we might have a slight problem
yeah oh yeah we got four eight pin connectors
and that's not enough today each of these needs three eight pin pci express
connectors that has got to be overkill do you think the power supply will be
good enough what's in here a thousand watt sea sonic i have my
doubts it was able to run four gb 100s for
months yeah i still have my doubts
cable me
nice catch this is NVIDIA's nv link bridge 4 slot
for 30 series products yes my friend NVIDIA
friend yeah i guess i don't have friends plural anyway yes my friend NVIDIA has
changed the envy link connector again so
it's basically you know one card one envy link connector this one is actually
keyed differently and has i think double the bandwidth over the last one maybe so
wait wait what point did nvlink replace sli in terms of branding
it didn't sli was and continues to be
the branding for multiple cards working together for
gaming envy link is just the name of this
communication protocol and connector which happens to be much much faster
than the original sli finger and even the high bandwidth bridges that NVIDIA
introduced later on the reason it was developed was not for gaming it was
actually for their like ai and like data center products but if they were going
to build this high speed interconnect you might as well put it on
the gaming cards as well is what i'm assuming the thinking was nvlink is so
much faster than the sli interface was that it can even allow their other cards
to pool their memory together and work on much bigger jobs we actually talked
about this in more detail in this video right here all right please tell me it's
just going to boot up wow that is very sharp tv
and NVIDIA control panel dual 4090s they
show up sli boom there it is it may be dead but
here's its shambling corpse with that out of the
way let's have a look at the wide selection of sli ready games that we can
enjoy shadow of the tomb raider civilization six sniper elite four gears of war four
ashes is a singularity escalation strange brigade rise of the tomb raiders
on beyond before dead war hitman deus ex mankind divided battlefield 1 and halo
wars oh that's all the directx 12 ones also and here are some vulcan games with
support including red dead redemption 2 and quick 2 rtx ashes of the singularity
escalation stream brigade and zombie are before dead work
dang it three of those are from the other list they just support multiple apis so
installed on this system we have almost every sli capable game that is
oh that is pretty rough looking where do you want to start should we go straight
for one of my favorites shadow of the tomb raider sure but when we go for it
we are going for it i'm talking 4k absolutely maxed
everything except motion blur motion blur yeah there's actually a
thing on the forum the other day talking about how people don't think that you
should hate on motion blur so much really yeah i don't get it wow
they are both at 90 plus percent that's pretty cool so
did you can you know what no i don't wanna i don't wanna run the benchmark yet can i just enjoy it for a little
yeah give her this is the kind of gaming setup that
even ten years from now most people will have never experienced so i want to at
least try it out that was some interesting flicker right
there oh
you piece of you knew that was gonna
yeah that was so anticlimactic
look how funny he thinks he is i even have it all set up
no don't go away you're helping me plug these in i probably should have seen that coming
something to note is that while a thousand watts is
probably enough to realistically power these cards under a sustained load
what's interesting about the rtx 30 series is that it can experience sudden
spikes in current that can actually trip the over current protection of a power
supply that on paper seems like it should be able to handle
the load so for years NVIDIA and AMD
both have been recommending power supplies that i would look at and i'd go
ah you can get away with less than that but for the first time i would actually
say you should probably go 20 over their recommendation to make sure
that you don't experience something like that all right let's try this again
and this game absolutely maxed out looks
freaking incredible
what's more surprising to me is the usage on these gpus both of them are
above 80 usage that's crazy
you can really hear them ramping up already even at our lowest dips we're not seeing
any lower than 50 to 55 frames per second which
especially on a g-sync monitor is gonna feel really fluid
not quite as fluid as if you just had one GPU doing it though which is
interesting and well part of why sli is dead now
now to measure a little more objectively we're gonna let frame view run for 180
seconds while the shadow of the tomb raider benchmark runs its course here and apparently i'll
go have a quick meeting with nick light about our merch stuff lttstore.com
look at this guy over there with the razor mask hiding in the shadows
in the shadow of the tomb raider shady guy before the benchmarks done actually
we've got a really good opportunity to check out our max power draw here
because shadow of the tomb raider is consuming anywhere from 85 and 100
percent of the gpus all the way to like 90 and 100 percent so i did say before a
thousand watt was probably enough and it probably is remember that the power
supply isn't quite 100 efficient even if
it's 80 plus platinum or titanium and this is draw from the wall so
realistically it's going to be somewhere in the 950 watt range right now that's right
there's finally a system that actually needs a thousand watt power supply and
more for the spikes you know alex hasn't even finished transcribing
the numbers and i can already see the problem while our 90th percentile and
95th percentile numbers are way higher
than a single GPU it all falls apart in the 99th
percentile so what that means is that 90 percent of the time sli is
yeah damn near 70 faster than a single
card but 90 of the time isn't what you
feel when you're playing one percent of the time it dips down
just as low which is exactly those little stutters that i was feeling when
i was playing yeah there's the graph yeah there's the graph here's a graph
for the well whatever we'll overlay it there's a graph you guys saw the graph
already next game it's always interesting to see how
gamescanned benchmarks can well disagree with NVIDIA's frame view
tool this says 86 FPS minimum that
sounds pretty good frame view says
um 94 wait really yeah oh wow
well that's great deus ex mankind divided if you're still
playing this game sli rtx 3090 looking like a pretty good
option while we fire up red dead redemption let's take a moment to
appreciate the aura
coming off of this machine so here we should move your laptop it's going to
get cooked alex it's going to get cooked
i want to yes before we get the thermal camera though i just want to show you
guys where i can feel the heat of this machine from
holy crap i think i can still feel it definitely here 100
i mean it's a thousand watts it's like having a space heater on your
table i should have half expected the next result to balance out that good one
uh red dead redemption 2 just won't get past this black screen trying to load
the game so so much for 15 of the supported games
list to be clear there might be some way to get it working but we're not going to
spend any more time than that and neither should you this is a really
short benchmark apparently 30 seconds
really hard to read frame view with the in-game stats all up in my business
i just want to see how much usage there is
okay the good news is it's working the bad news is i still can't see how much
GPU usage is but that's okay because we brought the thermal camera
wow that top card is definitely running a little hotter than the bottom one
48.6 there got a a cool 65 on the top
dang all right summary time that confirms
what we thought we knew sli did nothing it actually made it
worse yay sli what's next
uh that's all that's as far as we got honestly i'm
good with that um none of these other ones you know what
let's just play quake 2 rtx for fun then
what do you think the most overkill quake 2 machine of all time it's so warm
all right so we've got eight freaking reflections how's our GPU
actually not bad GPU two sitting at about eighty percent
here ladies and gentlemen that's pretty cool ah
please die please die is he dead i can't
tell he did okay here we go
oh come on i'm down to like 19 health
i'm just gonna i'm running for it i'm running for it here boys i'm running for
it we're going we're go get out of the way
all right forget it i'm out but you should do the heat test you should do
the heat test i can feel it from here like easily
like flip your hands around now
yeah that's what i thought
let's have a look it's still maxed out at 10 22 in quake it's sitting at i'm
gonna assume it's lower than shadow of the tomb raider i suspect it's not doing much on CPU 908 watts
quite a bit you know what else is quite a bit
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