Video Performance Rating w/ SLI Bridge

Okay, now I know if you bridge two cards together with the SLI bridge, it will not double your graphics capabilities, but if my windows rating is 4.8 due to my graphics card, and if I bridge them, how much of a bump might I see? FYI, I have an Nvidia GeForce 8500 GT... nothing fancy, but it does okay.

Also, does the card have to be exactly the same card when you bridge it, or can it be something slightly different or quite a bit different?

Thanks!!

Everlong18 said:

SLI'ing two cards together won't really give much of an increase to your Windows rating score. When I had Vista with dual 7600s, it only increased the graphic score by like .1 or .2 I think, so nothing major.

You have to use the same model card, so it has to be another 8500GT with, ideally, the same amount of VRAM as the primary card. You can use any brand of card, such as you can SLI an ASUS 8500GT to say an XFX 8500GT and so on. If the clock speeds of either of the cards are different, then the one with the faster clock speeds will downclock it self to match the speeds of the slower card.

You can't SLI two totally different cards together i.e. you can't go out and buy an 8800GT to SLI with your 8500GT.

Great Info Everlong.

Just want to add that the cards combined power only comes in play when a 3D game or app demands it.

Greetings.

I see no benefit at all from enabling multi-gpu (same as SLI) or running in single card mode. Which is probably why the note at the bottom of the "View and print detailed performance and system information" states;

The gaming graphics score is based on the primary graphics adapter. If this system has linked or multiple graphics adapters, some software applications may see additional performance benefits.

The funny thing though is that I have seen people with the same card as myself get up 7.8 whereas I max out at 7.3 even when heavily oc'ed. Which is why no one should pay attention to WEI scores and instead rely on real world gaming gains Everlong18 mailed it with the SLI limitations too.

Zahl said:

I see no benefit at all from enabling multi-gpu (same as SLI) or running in single card mode. Which is probably why the note at the bottom of the detailed performance and system information states;

The gaming graphics score is based on the primary graphics adapter. If this system has linked or multiple graphics adapters, some software applications may see additional performance benefits.

The funny thing though is that I have seen people with the same card as myself get up 7.8 whereas I max out at 7.3 even when heavily oc'ed. Which is why no one should pay attention to WEI scores and instead rely on real world gaming gains Everlong18 mailed it with the SLI limitations too.

Difference in score might be different chipsets, different chipset drivers,
better mainboard design, better card design.
Different CPU performance, and Ram performance which all influence the throughput of the Windows graphics.

Thanks that makes sense though I wouldn't have thought my system could bottleneck my card even a little.
Also wei scores seem to tighten up big time once they hit the 7 mark. For example it takes an extra full 1GHz of clock speed for a C2Q to move from 7.3 to 7.5 (3.3 to 4.3GHz) so such a large gap seems a little nuts even on the graphics side.

Zahl said:

Thanks that makes sense though I wouldn't have thought my system could bottleneck my card even a little.
Also wei scores seem to tighten up big time once they hit the 7 mark. For example it takes an extra full 1GHz of clock speed for a C2Q to move from 7.3 to 7.5 (3.3 to 4.3GHz) so such a large gap seems a little nuts even on the graphics side.

Logarithmic scale.

I think that is, not to shock users with slow systems too much.