SLI motherboards

SLI (NVIDIA)

— motherboard support for SLI technology from NVIDIA.

This technology allows you to connect several separate NVIDIA video cards to your PC at once and combine their computing power, accordingly increasing the system's graphic flow Rate in specific tasks. Accordingly, this feature means that the motherboard is equipped with at least two slots for video cards - PCIe 16x; In general, SLI allows the combination of up to 4 separate adapters. This functionality is especially important for demanding games and “heavy” tasks like 3D rendering. However, it is worth keeping in mind that in order to use multiple video cards, this feature must also be provided in the application running on the computer. So in some cases, one powerful video adapter turns out to be more preferable than several relatively simple ones with the same total amount of VRAM.

Similar technology from AMD is called Crossfire (see the corresponding paragraph). The main difference between these technologies is that SLI is more demanding in terms of compatibility: it only works on video cards with the same GPU models (although other parameters - manufacturer, video memory size and frequency, etc. - may be different). In addition, video adapters in SLI must be connected with cable or bridge (the only exceptions are certain budget models); and support for this technology is somewhat more expensive than in the case of Crossfire, so it is less common on motherboards (and mostly together with the solution from AMD).