The Crappiest SLI Setup of ALL TIME
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2018-05-06
·
1,290 words · ~6 min read
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when you hear the letters SLI you probably think of grand gaming
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machines that can crush anything
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like GTX 1080 TI SLI four Titans but
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what about the other end of the spectrum just how bad can an SLI gaming machine
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be well once again lonus Tech tips is
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bringing you the answer to a burning question that nobody asked
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cooler Master's 25th anniversary edition
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Cosmos 2 features a unique dual curved
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tempered glass side panel check it out now at the link
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below so it all started while we were working on cheapest new egg PC and we
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stumbled across something astonishing hey our graphics card supports SLI and
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we've got two of them so of course we
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immediately set out to build what would end up being the cheapest and almost the
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worst SLI rig possible but the reason
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that we bought two of those GeForce 8400
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GS cards was actually in case one of
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them broke and it's always a good plan when we're ordering super cheap and old
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stuff for videos on on a deadline and sure enough while attempting to test SLI
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one of them broke almost immediately but honestly they weren't actually the worst
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SLI capable cards that NVIDIA ever made
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and if we were going to have to buy more cards anyway we felt like we should
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really go for the worst of the worst I
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mean effectively we were aware that there wouldn't be much difference
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between a turd burger and nail clipping soup and nail clipping soup
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but here at Linus Tech tips we only accept the best of the best or the worst
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of the worst so I present to you hailing from the Year 2006 the NVIDIA GeForce
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7100 GS the worst NVIDIA graphics card
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to ever feature support for
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SLI these things are so freaking
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worthless that it's hard to find one of them let alone two I mean on eBay there
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were a couple available but no matching Pairs and that's ignoring completely
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unreasonable shipping costs even our industry contacts like EVGA and ASUS
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didn't bother holding on to any of these so they had nothing kicking around cuz
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why would they fortunately though we
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have awesome fans and after a Twitter post Matt and Archer Grimes hooked us up
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with these beautiful specimens thanks guys so the
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GeForce 7100 then a card that was
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basically a Rebrand of the worst card on
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the market from the year 2004 the
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GeForce 6200 but now with
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SLI so with a whopping 20 W power draw a
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blistering 350 MHz core clock and 300
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MHz memory clock these things are only
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out computed by the most experienced Abacus users hailed in their time as
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only acceptable for office use and
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anything but sensible we're expecting running these cards in games to be about
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like taking your dad's lawn mower to L man's and he's got a push mower so we
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toss them in our system and huh where's
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the set SLI configuration option I mean
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it says so on the web page SLI maybe it's Windows 10 screwing with our
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drivers but in Windows 7 it it doesn't work either documentation for running
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these guys in SLI is basically a couple
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of jokes about it on Tech forums from 10 years ago and then one German review
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website that did get it to work so there was still hope after some more digging
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we found out that only x58 boards and
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older will work with the SLI drivers so
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Ro walk on then time to oh crap then
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while installing the board on our bench one of the capacitors literally fell off
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its leads so after stealing a similar enough
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one off of another dead motherboard and soldering it on we were back in business
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maybe it still wouldn't work after some
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more digging it turns out that maybe only 32bit versions of Windows will
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support this old of SLI making the 48
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gigs of RAM in our system look a little imba and unnecessary but we decided to
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leave it all in there anyway cuz it looks cool in the end almost hashtag out
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of ideas we blew the dust off of our CD drive burned ourselves a copy of Windows
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XP 32bit and spent about a morning in
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driver compatibility hell until finally
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yes finally we had the Pinnacle of piss
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poor PC performance so first we tried
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out some games using one of the 7100s to
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set a baseline where it performed about
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as well as you'd expect 1 and2 FPS in 3D
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Mark 2006 like 10 in crisis and actually
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a pretty good experience in Halo Combat Evolved and well over 60 frames per
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second in 3D Mark 2001 SE so we were
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hopeful about its performance with SLI
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enabled until well everything crashed
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almost immediately 3D Mark 2001 2006
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Halo crisis and halflife 2 the SLI
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performance of this machine completely exceeded our expectations for how crap
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it would be truly the definition of
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unplayable the only 3D object that wouldn't crash the computer immediately
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was the 3D text screen saver and even
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that had stuttering issues and we aren't
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talking soft crashes here you open a game boom and you'll be reaching for the
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reset switch we tried a bunch of different drivers from
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91.4 all the way up to 307 since we wanted at least one game to
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work so we could compare performance and
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they all immediately died with SLI
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enabled so you might asking yourself then why bother releasing this video at
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all well I guess it's because we learned some things along the way that we felt
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were important to pass along One driver
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support for 11-year-old graphics cards isn't great number two Windows XP isn't
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as good as we all remember it being number three capacitors can fall off old
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motherboards pretty easily then can be fixed pretty easily and finally four
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holy sweet whatever you do
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don't run the 7100 GS in SLI you're
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welcome Ting is the mobile carrier that is focused on customer service and
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customer satisfaction first you don't
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speak to a robot when you call customer service at Ting you get put through
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directly to a person and somehow they manage that with an average Tang bill
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for their customers out there of only 23
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bucks a month month per device because Ting is all about the concept of paying
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for only what you use so this is cool
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you go onto their website we've got a link below lin.com and you try out the
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savings calculator you enter your last few bills with your current carrier and
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how much data and talk time you used and it spits out whether you would save
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money on Ting and if you would save money on Ting they will actually cover
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25% of your cancellation fee out of your existing contract up to
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$75 and if you use our link down below
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you'll also get 25 bucks in service credit or towards a new device so go try
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it out that's Linus doing.com so thanks
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for watching guys if you dislike this video you can hit that button but if you
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liked it hit the like button get subscribed maybe consider checking out where to buy a new graphics card in the
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video description also down there is our merch store where you can buy cool shirts like this one and our community
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