How do I link 2 video cards?

I'm buying 2 XFX GeForce 8800 GS Video Cards and am wondering how I link them to combine their performance on my PC.

How do I link 2 video cards?
You can infact link 2 video cards together, and depending on the brand and motherboard the result will very.





Firstly, the 2 methods of video card linking are as follows:





Nvidia Cards : Use SLI Technology


ATI Cards: Use Crossfire Technology





Both essentially perform the same task to achieve the same results, but vary in name due to rights for each company.





What does SLI/Crossfire do?





This is a method in linking 2 video cards to increase performance by splitting the amount of work handled by each GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) in half. Essentially, you would believe that this makes the cards run twice as fast, which isn't technically the case as you will see shortly.





In order for this setup to be achieved, you will need to have purchased and SLI or CROSSFIRE ready motherboard, that comes with the bridge to place between SLI and CROSSFIRE ready video cards. As listed, your card will be SLI capable, and provided you have an SLI board (eVGA 780i FTW) for example, you are in good standing.





Note: Running SLI is extra power usage, be sure you meet the power requirements for an SLI ready machine before attempting to install the second card as it could prevent the machine from successfully booting. (750W+ Is a good place to start.)





When purchasing the motherboard that the cards will run in be sure to check the following conditions:





1) There are 2 x16 PCI-Express slots


2) They are uniquely pipelined, which will be explained below.





When SLI was first released, SLI capable motherboards would share the pipes between 2 cards. For example, one card in the system would run at 16x, and inserting 2 cards would make both run at 8x, severely crippling the performance. Most boards today will come with 16x/16x capability, and the performance will not suffer.





SLI is great for running on higher resolutions, where there are more pixels to be processed at a quick rate. If you are playing on a low resolution, and low quality settings due to CPU (central processing unit) restrictions, then you are unlikely to see an increase in performance as the CPU will bottleneck the graphics potential of the machine.





That being said make sure your system is up to date with hardware, the motherboard is 16x/16x SLI ready, and you install the latest drivers from NVIDIA's website to enable SLI.





- Ryan
Reply:Doing that is called sli and you'll need an sli bridge cable which should come with your motherboard if it is capable of doing sli.





Just put each card in, and there should be an obvious port facing upwards in the side of the card to plug the cable into.
Reply:You will need an SLI bridge that looks something like this: http://estore.asus.com/images/C1TC60-0A0... However, this will only work if your motherboard has 2 PCI Express x16 slots and is SLI ready.
Reply:You can only link one Video card to the motherboard


there is no way to link 2 video cards together

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