Is SLI Worth it? GTX 1080 TI Performance (MSI Gaming X Trio)

What's up everyone my name is Mark from silence tech today we're gonna check out an age-old topic SLI a lot of PC gamers have completely given up on the technology over the last year so I thought it would be interesting to see if support is still there today we're

Going to check out a pair of relatively new MSI gaming extra Oh 1080 T eyes and putting them through their paces in two-way SLI the idea of today's video is to see if SLI is still worth it and who could

Actually benefit from the potential extra performance SLI or scalable link interface has been around for a very long time there are several modes but the most commonly used today is AFR which will

Alternate frames from each cars both cars will output a frame at your monitor effectively decreasing the workload potentially allowing for extra performance tight and even frame times are also very important for a game is

Perceived smoothness and the fact both cards are delivering a frame each can cause inconsistent frame times and games can appear to run worse or even stutter for SLI enabled this is where drivers come in without a properly configured

Driver SLI can be a complete mess I definitely notice this while testing on a couple games watchdogs 2 was a prime example sure frame rates increase but because of poor frame times the game actually appears to run worse FPS only

Tells a small part of the story using in video inspector you are able to create your own profiles that can help increase performance or use it to eradicate stuttering completely it's a great piece of software that said gamers aren't

Really prepares to take the time to learn how to use it understandably so and video completely dropped all SLI support on car slower than a gtx 1070 last year while that was a shame I fully agree with them surely would be better

For an owner to his let's say gtx 1060 and to go ahead and buy a gtx 1080 later down the road rather than pay his gtx 1060 with another having to deal with sli issues plus most owners of a gtx 1060 will

Probably be gaming at a lower resolution which could cause a cpu bottleneck ultimately leading to poor sli scaling in all games unfortunately sli requires a beastly cpu in 2017 and in the past it wasn't such

An issue but today's GPUs have increased in performance dramatically and CPUs haven't leaving SLI now best suited for high resolution gamers and I'll get a bit more into that in a second firstly if you're thinking of running

SLI what is the best CPU for the job now I know a lot of you will state it doesn't matter as long as you have a fast a single core speeds but over the last year there's been a lot of talk about how important it is to have a CPU

With enough pcie express lanes to allow your GPUs to run in a time 16 x 16 configuration popular cpus like the 59 30k and 68 50k have proven to a degree that they do indeed increase sli scaling and performance opposed to a cpu that

Only allows two cars to run at times 8 my CPU is a 68 50k overclocked to 4.5 gigahertz using it with my msi telly TT i trios and at times 8 x 8 configuration I noticed a reduction in performance by about 10 FPS gain for gain this video is

Mainly focused on SLI so I'm not going to go into too much detail about pcie express lanes that said I can highly recommend anyone thinking of running to high-end cars in 2017 to get a CPU with enough pcie express lanes to run or put

Both cars in a time 16 x 16 configure raishin such as the previously mentioned 59 30k or 68 50k what's interesting is Intel decided to only offer a CPU with enough PCI Express Lanes for around a thousand US dollars or 900 UK pounds in

Its newest skylake x-series leaving SLI users on an X 99 platform no option but to pay mega money for little extra performance gains next we're going to show some games while running two-way SLI at various resolutions 1080p 1440p

And 4k the idea is to see if there's any improvements in SLI scaling between the resolutions SLI is a technology for TV use and of course it's not going to magically increase your cpu performance so we need to see at what point a CPU

Bottleneck becomes apparent at a 1920 by 1080 resolution on rice of the Tomb Raider a fairly recent game it would appear that SLI is terrible if you look at the GPU usage on both cars they are both pinned at around 40 to 50 percent

So both GPUs are at half load making it pointless to even have SLI on at all but the problem isn't SLI failing in fact it's working perfectly the GPUs are so powerful the CPU can't keep up stalling performance increasing the

Resolution to two 560 by 1440 GPU usage has increased making SLI reasonably viable at 1440p but still there clearly isn't that much of a performance increase jumping to 4k and now we are only just starting to see SLI working

Correctly only because the system is now a GPU bound and that's with a 68 50k overclocked to 4.5 gigahertz while testing this happens with every game in fact even 4k couldn't make my system GPU bound on some titles only increasing the

Resolution even further got both cards running at 90 Plus my poor 6850 k couldn't even speed up enough his render times just weren't up to the task one thing I noticed was stutter it was improved the higher the

Resolution was as well at 1080p stuttering was pretty bad when my system was CPU bound and is seemingly improved the high I pushed the resolution something about being CPU bound while gaming in SLI caused the games to run

Terrible so who is SLI actually for certainly not 1080p gamers anymore since to GTX 10 70s are going to wipe the floor with even the latest and greatest CPUs out there causing the CPU to bottleneck SLI performance resulting in

Poor scaling and as far as I can tell once your CPU bound it causes quite a bit of stuttering SLI in my opinion is now aimed towards high resolution gamers thanks to CPUs not improving in speed fast enough while I've been testing I

Wouldn't even recommend SLI for 1440p gamers they increase in performance isn't enough in SLI at 1440p to warrant purchasing an extra card even when you're in game settings are on ultra and that's especially so if you've got a

High refresh rate monitor because your CPU is going to become CPU bound real easily resulting in poor scaling and you may notice that you're getting the same amount of FPS and a single card as you are with to which I do myself notice but

Because I have three monitors when I'm running like triple screen games driving games I notice a big increase in performance 4k gamers on the other hands or any resolution that makes your system a GPU bound

I can recommend SLI no trouble at all and the twelve recent games I tested eight of them all had good SLI support but the benefits were only apparent at 4k or higher resolutions triple monitor setups can also benefit from SLI

Immensely with a triple monitor 1440p setup SLI works very well as expected with combined resolution of 7680 by 1440 my GPUs most of the time were pinned at 95% load in a lot of games round enough now

As a summary is SLI dead in 2017 in a way yes but as far as my testing shows SLI is not broken at all in fact it works just as well as it ever has GPUs are becoming more and more powerful every year and that's the problem

Because CPUs are leaving the technology broken in previous years the SLI fanbase mainly consisted of budget gamers wanting a quick way to bump up their performance and that's not possible in 2017 but I don't blame Nvidia for

Stopping support for mid-range cars it was the right thing to do because even two gtx 1060 s will run away from any top-tier cpu resulting in terrible scaling at lower resolutions like 1080p a common resolution for people with

Mid-range cars anyway guys I hope you've enjoyed my force and opinions on SLI in late 2017 my name's mark from silence tech goodbye you