The TINIEST Nvidia SLI Setup EVER?
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2018-05-06
·
1,181 words · ~5 min read
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in early q2 of this year NVIDIA announced g-force g-assist a usb stick
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that would enable a suite of features called g-force assisted gaming so ghost
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play would use ai to analyze your gameplay style then if you have to get
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up to get the door or something it would just keep playing as though it was you
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neat boss boost could analyze boss fights and help you with the most
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effective way to beat them you could use it one time per session and envy nurture
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would even tell you when to eat and drink to stay nourished and hydrated
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even going as far as to tell you when the drinks in your fridge were chilled
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obviously of course that was an april fool's joke
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but after much
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clamoring from the community NVIDIA did
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actually produce a g-force gtx styled usb drive in the
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same kind of form as the g assist so it
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looks just like a little miniature gtx
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1080 isn't that adorable so NVIDIA produced only 1080 of them and
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i see what you did there because 4k gaming right
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and they sent us two of them so naturally our first question was
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can they run traces and the answer of course was no that's
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stupid they're usb drives they're 64 gig thumbsticks our second question then was
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can we run them in sli
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let's find out
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cooler masters 25th anniversary edition
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cosmos 2 features a unique dual curved tempered glass side panel
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check it out now at the link below
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but how do we run sli obviously there's no you know sli
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enable button in NVIDIA's control panel for a a gag limited run product
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so we got to thinking well raid then would be the closest
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thing to running multiple storage devices together for increased
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performance but this raises other questions how do
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we do that hardware raid cards are the best raid
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experience but as you can probably imagine
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nobody really makes a hardware raid card these are like 500 plus dollar devices
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for putting thumb drives in them so no
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we're gonna have to go back to our good old friend software raid something we've
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actually used several times in the past including on our ill-fated raid 50
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solid-state wanik server so for our first attempt
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then things are going to be pretty simple we go ahead and plug in both drives
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they're both formatted right out of the box
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we open up the disk management software that's included with Windows look at
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that they're both detected and then
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stumbling block what should come up when we right click
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on the drives is the option to convert them to dynamic disks
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they need to be dynamic disks in order for us to run software raid i mean to be
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clear i'm not complaining that Windows doesn't allow you to run a
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raid on removable usb devices that's
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a terrible terrible idea but that doesn't change the fact that i
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want to do it so fortunately we found some unverified instructions on the
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internet that should allow us to load a
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really ancient 64-bit usb drive driver
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and hopefully get our raid 0 game on
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so the first step is that we need to disable secure boot including unloading
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the pk keys then well we tried installing the old
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unsigned usb driver to trick the system but that failed with an error about
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driver signing so by shift rebooting
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then disabling driver signature in the advanced startup options
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we can force the driver to install using
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device manager once that happened
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both drives were detected as normal internal drives rather than usb drives
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and the striped array option becomes available for us too
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no come on
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surely my random thing i found on the
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internet with a random driver from 2006
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should have worked but it didn't
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well desperate times call for desperate
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measures i took to googling it and found this
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video from the 8-bit guy
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whose channel intro says the ibook got
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hold on a minute oh no
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you can't do it on the pc but you can do it on a mac
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here goes then we got our 2017 macbook pro
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and we are going to do this because i am determined to run sli usb drives even if
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i have to do it on a macbook
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oh all right
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i'm a little rusty on my mac operation i actually haven't touched this thing
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since uh since i did my review of it um
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right nothing on a mac is done by right clicking
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right raid assistant striped raid zero
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that's what we want no way
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is it this easy is it gonna work okay
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sli raid okay
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this looks promising no
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it works gtx sli raid
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no freaking way
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okay so let's fire up blackmagic disc speed test
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change our target and bam
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let's have a look at what these write speeds look like baby
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okay uh
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there you go they're not the fastest drives in the world but
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114 megabytes per second on our sli raid
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is actually faster than the 72 megabytes
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per second that we got on a single drive
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so does sli work
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on the GeForce gtx g assist limited
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edition usb 1080 drive
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not a real product thing the answer is
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so thanks for watching guys if you dislike this video then you clearly
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don't enjoy fun but if you liked it hit the like button get subscribed maybe
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consider checking out where to buy the stuff we featured okay you can't buy
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these but you could buy a real one at the link in the video description
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also down there is our merch store which has cool shirts like this one and our
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community forum which you should totally join