Photo by Coaster J
SLI (Scalable Link Interface) is a marvelous technological innovation that allows two or more graphics cards to be simultaneously utilized to gain an overall boost in performance. It can handle 2 to 4 GPUs at once, and it is NVIDIA’s equivalent to AMD’s Crossfire technology. Technically, most of the information in this article will be applicable to both Crossfire and SLI, but the specific topic of this post will be SLI.
SLI gained popularity in recent years largely due to the bitcoin mining craze, but also because of a certain class of gamers who are determined to squeeze every drop of possible performance out of their rigs. But how useful is SLI—and, more importantly, is it worth going all-out and building a rig with four GPUs running in sync?
The short answer is no. It is not worth building a rig with 4-way SLI. And the answer for 3-way SLI is much the same. But depending on your needs and approach, it may sometimes be worth going for 2-way SLI. For more details and specific reasoning, read on: