cpu speed affecting sli preformance

My friend told me that any clock speed lower than 3.2ghz with a quad core cpu causes an sli setup to not run at full potential. is this true?

It depends on the cpu in question, the game, the video cards and resolution with settings...
At lower resolutions the cpu will be a bottleneck, but the gpu bottleneck is with higher resolutions and settings (AA+AF influence this alot). At 1920x1200 you would need a GTX285 tri sli setup if all settings are maxed to make the cpu the bottleneck in many games...

From what I've read you can't give an SLI setup enough CPU power. The faster the better!

With a single card 3.2-3.4GHz should be adequate.

fusion509 said:

My friend told me that any clock speed lower than 3.2ghz with a quad core cpu causes an sli setup to not run at full potential. is this true?

Click to expand...

Your friend left out a lot of important factors..

Resolution and which cards you are SLIing being the biggest ones..

Badbonji said:

It depends on the cpu in question, the game, the video cards and resolution with settings...
At lower resolutions the cpu will be a bottleneck, but the gpu bottleneck is with higher resolutions and settings (AA+AF influence this alot). At 1920x1200 you would need a GTX285 tri sli setup if all settings are maxed to make the cpu the bottleneck in many games...

Click to expand...

If you are not running 5Ghz+ CPU a Tri-SLI of 285's will easily be held back by the CPU speed. If you can't
run at least 4.5Ghz CPU then a Tri-SLI of 285 is completely point less unless your are running 2560 x 1600
resolution. It simply would not scale worth a damn. Even a pair of 285's in a normal SLI will not fully scale up at
1900x1200, with AA and AF dialed in, below about 4.2Ghz (Intel). 5Ghz would be better

It takes massive amounts of CPU speed (actually the FPU in the CPU) to keep any of these late generation, top
end GFX cards fully data loaded when run in an SLI.

It will of course vary some from game to game but the biggest reason you do not see good SLI (or CorssFire) scaling
in most reviews is simply the CPU speed of the test system is just to damn low to allow the cards to scale well.

Viper

I said that the GTX285 tri sli would be bottlenecked by the cpu
It also depends if the game can handle more than one thread and with dx11 coming I think all cpu threads are going to be utilised more efficiently.

Badbonji said:

I said that the GTX285 tri sli would be bottlenecked by the cpu

Click to expand...

You also said that all settings would need to be maxed out, which is hardly the case. OT, there are many factors affecting multi-GPU performance, as others have already made clear. CPU speed isn't all that matters; even dual-SLI setups can show a performance improvement using a stock i7 920 over many other CPUs.

I was just trying to say when you have high settings and resolution you need powerful cards otherwise the graphics cards will be the bottleneck is all
Core i7 is definately the best for sli, but I am sure any recent high end cpu will have their bottleneck over 100fps...