Any advantage to not running SLI?

I have two 7800M GT in an SLI configuration (not sure whether that its one physical card or not but is recognized as two) in my M1730. I disabled SLI to save on power, but was told in another thread that simply disabling SLI does not cut power to the second GPU. If that is the case, is there any advantage to disable SLI? Would the fans run less? Why do they provide for such an option in the first place?

Thanks in advance for all help!

 

I was under the impression that disabling SLI improves battery life. It also allows TV hookups and multimonitor support (one card to each monitor).

 

Disabling SLI does reduce power consumption, even if it doesn't shut one of the cards off and simply leaves it idle. It will reduce temperatures as well, since power consumption is reduced.

Some applications also don't work well with SLI and turning it on for those programs can reduce performance.

Also, in some cases if you have a single card fail you can continue to use the other one by disabling SLI.

 

Framerates in games that don't support it improves once you turn off SLI.

 

SLI sounds like a marketing gimmick to me. Am I right? Do a lot of games take advantage of it?

EDIT: Oh, and thanks for the help!

 

The performance gains never seem to be quite as high as you hear about in marketing pieces, but for the most part I find it gives a very nice boost to framerates. The only downside is sometimes you can get micro-stuttering with SLI. Well, and it increases the chance of hardware failure of course since more things can go wrong.

Most modern games should support it these days, and having multiple cards does seem to be an increasing trend in high-spec machines, so support will probably improve more over time. It's a bit like multi-core processors; they're mainstream these days and so we're starting to see more programs optimising for the extra cores.

 

Thanks Photolysis, great explanation.

I've noticed intermittent stuttering with my OS (window maximization/minizimation). Very random and sporadic. I wonder if that is the stuttering you refer to.

 

I'm sure I read about others with the stuttering problem when minimising/maximising the other day. Apparently a driver update fixed it.

I was actually referring to something else. Basically in some cases it's possible for one card to have a higher frame rate than the other, and this causes a small delay of a few frames, hence the name "micro-stutter".