What bridge to buy for a Ultra-D modded to SLR

[Saruji]

Hello,

Trying to run 2 8800 gt's on a DFI LanParty Nforce 4 Ultra-D board, modded(tuned) to sli. Missing the bridge, posted a WTB thread in the classifieds section, no responses so far. I'd like to just buy one but dont know which one to buy. There seem a few different models, one is 70mm, 80mm, 90mm, 3.5 inch and one says that its flexible. Are the bridge's video card specific or motherboard specific? Will this work? Please help, I really want to get this bad boy going!

Thanks ahead of time,
Saruji

Cliffs:

- Have 2 * 8800 gt's

- Want to buy SLI bridge for a DFI LanParty Nforce 4 Ultra-D board modded to SLI

- Dont know if the SLI bridge is board specific or video card specific or if it doesn't matter as long as the bridge will reach

- Will this work?


*One thing I might have overlooked, I assumed that two 8800 gt's would work on an older dfi nf4 ultra-d board, was I wrong in my assumption?

 

[QuietIce]

They should work but the older boards won't run 2x 16-bit, AFAIK - it'll be down-graded to 16-bit + 8-bit.

Both the ASUS bridges shown are flexible. I have a couple of bridges laying around myself since I run ASUS A8N32-SLI's as SETI crunchers but don't use SLI, that would be a waste of video cards and motherboard power!

Have you measured the distance between the cards ...???

 

[Saruji]

They should work but the older boards won't run 2x 16-bit, AFAIK - it'll be down-graded to 16-bit + 8-bit.

Both the ASUS bridges shown are flexible. I have a couple of bridges laying around myself since I run ASUS A8N32-SLI's as SETI crunchers but don't use SLI, that would be a waste of video cards and motherboard power!

Have you measured the distance between the cards ...???

I see, so what your saying is that the memory bandwidth will go to crap anyways with pci-e 1.1 or 1.0 right?

Pci-ex16 has a max bandwidth of 40 Gb, where as a 8800 Gt can do like 60-80 Gb by itself. So basically I have a bottleneck that will only so bad that the other 8800 wont even be noticeable and might as well not even be there. In fact I guess it would even possibly cause a slow down. Am I getting that right?

 

[QuietIce]

40 Gb/sec???

Anyway, the PCIe 2.0 protocol provides a transfer rate double that of PCIe 1.1 so x16 + x8 would be 75% of PCIe 2.0 x16. But you still have the added memory of the extra card and the 50% increase in data transfer over a single 1.1 x16 slot ...

 

[Saruji]

thanks, I tried doing the two and it really wasnt worth the performance increase if any, my system is already maxed out at current settings and two 8800 gt's was just way too loud. My initial thinking was that I just wanted to run only linux on my rig, but the ati was buggy, after working through all the bugs with ati's new found enthusiasm in support for linux I still wasnt completly happy. There were encoding issues with video used with all the glamor and effects that compiz brings. So I opted to go to the most linux loved brand nvidia and went a little overboard with the extra card, its quite alright bc as you said it can be used on a different rig. Besides man was it loud with 2 of them in, both pny's but one was so much louder then the other and in sli it was incredibly loud. So as soon as I put both of them in I was thinking no. Anyways, thanks for you replies, I found it helpful to read up on pci-e.