8600m GT Sli Rubbish!

Hey guys, My other half got me an Alienware area51 m17x, I am really happy with it to be honest;it came with 2 8600m gt's a t9300 and 4gb of ram

Dare I to say, 8600gt in SLi sucks, when i turned sli off, Stalker Clear Sky performed much better.Sli enabled i was getting 10-15fps, disabled i got a smooth 25-40. Clear Sky was on medium settings with full dynamic lighting and 1400x768 resolution. I'm thinking of selling one of the 8600s towards a 9800gt, what do you guys think? I just think 2 cards in my system at the moment is a waste.
Cheers

 

I got the first sli enabled gaming laptop with dual 8600m gts cards on the Toshiba x205 SLI1. If I can remember correctly it was released back in 2007, at that time it could play games awesome, but I remember that it struggled badly with Gears of War.

Anyway that laptop got stolen, so I bought the newly release successor the Toshiba X305 Q701 with a single 9700m gts, and loading all the games I had onto my X305 Q701, I was concerned it wouldn't run the games at the same framerates as the dual 8600m gts in my previous laptop.

Well, lo and behold that single 9700m gts in the newer X305 beat out the dual 8600m gts, with faster framerates that made my games playable, especially in Gears of War could the difference be told.

 

Don't forget you talk about 3-4 generation old card now ....

 

If it is indeed possible, to upgrade your machine with a single 9800M GT or 8800M GTX, do that without thinking.

The performance gap is hard to overstate.

 

Some games aren't optimized for SLI. You 8600m SLI is a little faster than my 330m, and I can run Just Cause 2 and Call Of Duty Black Ops on medium 1024x768.

My question is: Why are you bashing a 4 year old video card?

I just tried to find a 9800m and 8800m and it would be cheaper to buy an laptop.

 

thanks for the info guys, I'm, broke so I'll have to start selling stuff on ebay, there's a 9800m GT for 400GBP. If I only rock 1 card in my machine will I notice much of a performance drop in other games? I own Company Of Heroes, Half Life, CS:S, Day of Defeat Source, Command and Conquer RA:3 etc,

Thanks again for all your help, It's most appreciated

 

Performance difference may vary between games whether it's a performance gain or loss. SLI doesn't exactly give too much of a performance gain usually ._.

 

8800GTX or re badged 9800GT's (same cards) are very very hard to come by now a days so the rip off price on ebay for £400 is about right.
its still a stonking card though. mine is almost 3 years old and still going strong and hasnt struggled with any game yet.

the one thing youve got to watch out for is there have been at least 5 dead cards reported on here since january and they all used the baking method to bring them back to life so hopefully this card isnt one of them as its not a permanent fix.

 

This 8800M GTX for £210 looks like the best deal.

 

wow, great find Kevin.

 

Why not try different drivers first? NVIDIA & Laptop News | Latest NVIDIA drivers and related news | laptopvideo2go.com is a good source.

 

8600M GT in SLI are severely bottlenecked by nature, and no driver update is going to propel beyond anything but mediocre status.

 

As noted earlier, both cards in tandem can't overcome the obsolescence of a 4-year old mid-range card. The OP would be well-advised to shop around for an upgrade for better performance, video driver upgrades have more or less reached a plateau for the card that won't progress further.