In those rare cases where the cards are mismatched, the slower or lesser card will become dominant, with the better card adjusting by either running at the same speed as the other card or disabling its extra memory. Once the slave has rendered its part of the screen, it sends it to the master, which then combines the two renders and outputs to the monitor. In a two-card setup, the master will work on the upper part of the screen, while the slave will manage the bottom part. Graphics cards are set up in a master-slave configuration, which means one card will assume the role of the “master” even though the workload is distributed equally to all cards. However, on rare occasions, it’s possible to run “mixed SLI” configurations on some cards that only have a matching core codename, such as G70, G73, G80, and so on. They need to be the same model and series, although it is possible to get them from different manufacturers.įor example, if one is made by MSI and the other by ASUS, and the third one by Gigabyte, you’ll still be able to configure them together on the same machine. Hooking up a GTX 1080 and GTX 1070 won’t work, despite their similarities. Secondly, you need identical graphics cards. If you’re only going for a two-card setup, then cards can be configured to work in SLI mode. This is a really vital step, so be careful, particularly as some motherboards support SLI, others CrossFire, some both, or neither. Still, there are a few more requirements than just a couple of available PCI-Express x16 slots.įirst, you need to check if the motherboard is SLI compatible. A friend of mine fried his motherboard thinking that, as he had enough slots, he could insert graphics cards and simply boot up the computer.