nForce4 motherboard with dual 9600GT in SLi

There isn't much in the way of an answer that I could find, so with this blog entry I leave a trail for those who decide to take the plunge into SLi as I have.

I have an MSI(Microstar)K8N Neo4 Platinum/SLi motherboard (nForce4) with dual XFX 9600GT XXX Alpha Dog Edition graphics cards, and a Seasonic S12 650W power supply.

I am running two 30 inch Dell 3007WFP-HC LCDs and one 20 incher in Portrait with a GeForce 6200 card in PCI.

I can confirm that you only need one 9600GT to drive dual 30 inch LCDs. It works at the 2560x1600 resolution just fine. You probably could do the same with a card as old as a 7800GTX, which I had previously, but I haven't verified that yet.

SLi at this time, does not support multiple monitors, so in the nVidia Control Panel software that loads with the 175.19 driver, I turned off Dual View. I also had to disable my 6200 graphics card in Windows Device Manager.

Then in the nVidia Control Panel, under 3D settings the Configure SLi setting appeared. So basically you can have only one graphics card with one LCD to enable SLi.

I have only 2GB of Corsair DDR400 PC3200 RAM installed. SLi worked fine for me. When I started Call of Duty 4, what I noticed were the subtleties like snow falling and blowing in the wind. It gave me more of a feeling of how cold it was. Was it smoother? I donno...it was smooth and fast, but it was pretty much the same without SLi too. I'm thinking only the most avid gamers would notice much of a difference. But it's something to brag about for sure. I think SLi is more of a benchmarkers thrill, where a 1% gain in performance is something to celebrate, even though the human eye could never detect it. I'll get more use running quad LCDs from the two cards than I will from gaming, frankly. But for games like Crysis, which I haven't tried yet, I've read that SLi is beneficial.

With SLi disabled again, I return to Dual View with my 30 inch LCDs and enable the 6200 card in Device Manager, to reactivate my 20 inch LCD. If I wanted I could drive two more LCDs off my second 9600GT card while NOT in SLi mode.

The two PCIe 16x slots are running at 8x, but according to this performance review from anandtech.com, "...the real world performance impact is absolutely nothing." http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2258&p=2