Originally posted by Larry
Iv made a few changes, one of which was the mothermoard. Since the 7950 Im buying is only $190 and is a SLI card I would get a mothermoard that has two PCI-E 16x slots.
The one I picked was:
MSI P6N SLI-FI LGA 775 NVIDIA nForce 650i SLI ATX Intel Motherboard
Maybe in a few months I can get another 7950.
The 650 is a good chipset. HOWEVER, it only operates at 16x PCI-E mode when only one card is being used. If you are running SLI, it goes to 8x mode. So the performance isn' there. Only thing you'd want to get a 2nd card for is if you want to run more than 2 monitors.
SLI is a good idea in theory, but it is not practical. Why? In order to take full advantage of SLI and actually get 'some' use out of it, you would need the fastest processor on the market. Before the Quad-cores came out, tomshardware tested two 8800GTX's with multiple processor and found you'd need the $1000 X6800 in order to keep up with the two GPU's. I.e. the video card were processing data faster than the CPU -> thus a CPU bottleneck.
And two 7950's may yield 10-15% boost in performance over just 1. Don't waste your money. And if you have the extra money to spend, but a faster processor, more ram, faster/bigger hard drive, but don't spend it on another video card.