SLI Really Worth It?

SLeePYG72786 said:

BeKure said:

I picked up another 550ti and I am running 2 of them in SLI and while gaming my frames per second will spike all the way down to single digits about every 30 seconds or so. This is very frustrating. I'm playing Batman Arkum City and it is horrible. The spikes last about 1-2 seconds but that is long enough to make the game unplayable. I also have Alice Madness returns and that spikes too but not as often as Batman does. Are there certain tweaks that I need to implement in order to optimize my gameplay experience? I purchased another card in order to enhance my gameplay experience, not ruin it. Any help would be appreciated.

If using Fraps, make sure to have the latest version and uncheck "Split movie every 4 Gigabytes" on the Movies tab. This will record it all into one single file, taking a bit of write load off of the hard drive.

An alternative to Fraps that I use is Dxtory. Way more options, and very comparable in quality even at lower quality settings.

I don't use Fraps. I use Bandicam and the FPS spike even while not recording. Thank you for the recommendation though.

Ok I have done a bit more research and some people are saying that SLI and Physx just don't play well together. Some people say that if you turn off SLI and just use 1 of my 560ti's for Physx and the other for graphics rendering then it helps a bit. I personally don't want to do this because the whole point of me buying another 560ti was so that I could run them in SLI. I do in fact have a older 9800 GTX and it supports Physx. Would it be possible to run my two 560ti's in SLI while using my old 9800 GTX for just Physx? Is the 9800 GTX too old to even be compatible with the 560ti?
If it is possible would I need a special adapter to hook all 3 cards up, like another SLI bridge?
I want to be sure it would work before I go trying to hook it up and ruin something on my PC.
Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.