I have a quick question. I'm gonna be buying a second 250 to sli, which will eventually go to use in an older computer when the dx11 nvidias come out (using one of them for physx)

Since the effective ram isn't doubled, would there be any downside to using a 512mb edition of the 250, instead of a 1gb? My current card is 1 gb, and it should just use that, right?

Thanks

Well yes, there might be a downside because the 512 one might not be able to mirror the other card's amount of memory... Still, it'll be faster than single card anyway.

So if I get the 512 version, the memory would be scaled down to 512mb?

Also, I shouldn't worry too much about getting the same brand should I?

The brand shouldn't matter since they use the same chip...they only change the cooling (sometimes the PCB color, but that doesn't matter at all) of it.

As for the memory...I can't help you here since I have never used any card(s) in SLI or CrossFire.

I'm not really sure, but what I think what Genki is trying to say is that you are only going to have the sli advantage on the first 512 mb of memory. so if this is 512: ==== and this is a GB: ========
Then all the data past this point | Doesn't have the sli.
..............................................\/
...................card 1 (512): ====
.................card 2 (1024): ========
I hope I could help, but I'd check with Genki if I understood him correctly. -Graboy

Okay. Opted for 1 gb.

Msi twinfrozr gts 250 OC

It's arriving tomorrow.

Also, my family was on the market for a new house and we found one for foreclosure. If the deal goes through, we'd be saving about 90 grand
So my parents are really free with money now. To the point of it being disturbing.

but okay, I understand how the memory works now. Originally, I incorrectly thought the additional memory was just discarded. But this cleared it up for me!

I'm hoping for an increase from 25 to 35/40 fps on crysis >_<

Ha, good luck with your new card! -Graboy

Don't expect a huge jump in FPS with SLI, the performance difference is with stupidly high resolutions. If you're running a moderate (1600x1200 etc) resolution the difference will be relatively low.

Also, SLI helps most with anti-aliasing, from what I've read. Just upgrade your card, or TURN DOWN THE SETTINGS.

I'm in 1920x1080

Is that high enough to notice?

Also, I haven't used antialiasing in a lot of the more demanding games. So should I expect them to stay playable at 4x? Or higher?

A lot of the benchmarks show the 250 sli to be better than a gtx275 and sometimes close to a gtx 285.
Then I can overclock them a bit more above their factory overclocks hopefully?
The last driver update from nvidia said 30% increase in performance for crysis warhead, so I'm kinda hopeful.

But yeah I'd be satisfied with 50% scaling.