SLI With two different Nvidia cards

I have two cards:

GeForce GTX 460
GeForce GT 8600

Would it be possible to have these running simultaneous? Would it be best to have it running with SLI or simply with two drivers?

Marcus Hansson

Posted 2011-04-09T14:22:54.017

Reputation: 491

1You can't have them in SLi. I don't see any point in running them simultaneously – Sathyajith Bhat – 2011-04-09T14:57:27.510

Aah, okey. Well, since I´m not the best in hardware I simnply thought it would add some form of boost in whatever I want to do involving GPU's. – Marcus Hansson – 2011-04-09T15:12:35.747

Answers

There shouldn't be any problems running the two cards together with NVIDIA's drivers, but as others have mentioned, SLI won't work.

You could use one card for physX and one for video as explained here.

AndrejaKo

Posted 2011-04-09T14:22:54.017

Reputation: 16 459

Interesting thread, thanks for the tips. Marking yours as the answer. – Marcus Hansson – 2011-04-09T19:40:00.683

Well, yeah but the 8600m GT hasn't got the chops to function as a PhysX PPU – Sathyajith Bhat – 2011-04-10T05:51:44.270

@Sathya♦ No. According to PhysX FAQ and NVIDIA CUDA Programming Guide GeForce 8600 is capable of running as PhysX card. Also, I don't see from where you got the m part. From what I can see, OP isn't running a laptop and would be using the more powerful non-m version. Furthermore I have a card with similar compute capabilities (9500M GS) and have no problems running PhysX or CUDA on it.

– AndrejaKo – 2011-04-10T10:03:07.923

tbh the 9500 is quite a lot faster than the 8600 series. – Sathyajith Bhat – 2011-04-10T16:51:30.440

You can run different cards in SLI with drivers patched with DifferentSLI Auto. But the first three characters of the PCI device ID must match, and in your case this would not work.

https://github.com/EmberVulpix/DifferentSLIAuto/releases

Muh Fugen

Posted 2011-04-09T14:22:54.017

Reputation: 388

You won't be able to SLI them two, you can only run two identical cards in SLI, so wither 2 x 8600's or two GTX 460's obviously running 2 8600's is still less powerful than the GTX 460, so either make your next upgrade another 460 for SLI but obviously a lot more power and heat or go for the GTX 500 series or the future 600 series.

Sandeep Bansal

Posted 2011-04-09T14:22:54.017

Reputation: 6 168

Okey, but would it be possible to have them running with separate drivers? Without SLI, that is. – Marcus Hansson – 2011-04-09T17:58:02.363

No since they both use the same Nvidia drivers, if you had an ATI Card then you would be able to patch the Nvidia drivers for it to be usable side by side with the ATI card mainly for use with Physx and CUDA, but I believe your card is just about in the range to actually do this. – Sandeep Bansal – 2011-04-09T18:09:39.697