SLI: Is it worth it?

[Lonestar]

I've decided to build my own computer this time around instead of buying one from HP or Dell or what have you. In my glances through motherboards I notice that what seems to really drive the price up is whether or not a motherboard is SLI capable, which from what I understand allows two Nvidia cards to be used at once.

My question is...is it worth it? I've this laptop for two year and only recently have I started to hit a wall in regards to performance(specifically, Company of Heroes games where you have a lot of players, or Supreme Commander games with a shit-ton of units). Would it be worth it to not just get a good video card...but two instead?

Just curious to see if anyone around here uses it.

[Mr Bean]

20%-40% Performance improvement for 200% price increase. You decided.

Also those 40% increase are only going to be happing if your playing at 1280x1024 or higher.

At 1024x768 or below your talking about only 10% at most increases since your mostly CPU limited down there. The exception comes with AA. Adding in a second card lets you play 4x AA in most games for "free" IE with noticeable performance decrease. And in the lower resolutions you can even get away with 8x AA for "free".

[Uraniun235]

SLI is only useful when you want the absolute most performance possible and are willing to pay a hefty premium for it.

It's worthiness as an upgrade path is questionable; by the time you're craving more performance, buying a new second card which matches your old card will be a significant fraction of the price of a whole new cutting-edge card which will either match or outperform your old cards in SLI, with half the heat and fans and power draw of that SLI setup.

I would not consider lack of SLI support in a motherboard a deal-breaker.

[Ace Pace]

The problem is, most of the top tier motherboards are SLI capable. In the end, it doesn't matter much, since Lonestar isn't an OCer or someone who seems like he'd pay another $50 for another 5% pref boost.

[Beowulf]

OCing Core 2s is a very good way to increase performance for not much cost, since they OC so very well.

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

The short answer is no. The long answer is that SLI is worth it for people who absolutely have to play their games at ridiculously high resolutions with all settings maxed and are willing to spare no expense to do it. SLI'ing mid-ranged cards makes no sense because you can get a high end card for less that will cream 2 mid-ranged ones, and it's not good as an upgrade path because newer cards have historically always been faster than SLI'd last-gen cards and the older cards' prices are propped up by people wanting to get another for SLI, so they can be hard to find and expensive by the time you actually need one.

[Pint0 Xtreme]

You also have to consider the fact that after getting SLI, it makes it that much harder to decide whether to upgrade or not down the road since upgrading to a new card will drop your overall performance. Unless, you drop the cash to get two of them.

[TheFeniX]

As said, you're better off taking that money and just buying one top-end graphics card.