When you hear the letters SLI,
you probably think of grand gaming machines
that can crush anything like,
"*grunting* GTX 1080 Ti,
SLI, 4 Titans, urrrgh!"
But what about the other end of the spectrum?
Just how bad can an SLI gaming machine be?
Well, once again,
Linus Tech Tips is bringing you the answer to a burning question
that nobody asked!
Cooler Master's 25th anniversary edition Cosmos 2
features a unique dual curved tempered glass side panel.
Check it out now at the link below.
So it all started while we were working on Cheapest Newegg PC.
And we stumbled across something astonishing.
*HEY!* Our graphics cards support SLI!
And we've got two of them!
So of course, we immediately set out to build what would end up being cheapest and almost
the worst SLI rig possible.
But the reason we bought two of those GeForce 8400 GS cards was actually in case one of them broke.
And it's always a good plan when we're ordering super cheap and old stuff for videos on a deadline.
And sure enough, while attempting to test SLI, one of them broke, almost immediately.
But honestly, they weren't actually the worst SLI capable cards that Nvidia ever made!
And if we were gonna have to buy more cards anyway,
we felt like we should really go for the worst of the worst.
I mean, effectively we were aware that there wouldn't be much difference between a turd burger
and nail clippings sou-- *cut*
and nail clipping soup.
But here at Linus Tech Tips, we only accept the best of the best or the worst of the worst.
So I present to you, hailing from the year 2006,
The Nvidia GeForce 7100 GS!
The worst Nvidia graphics card to ever feature support for SLI!
These things are so frickin' worthless that it is hard to find one of them, let alone two.
I mean, on eBay there were a couple available but no matching pairs,
and that's ignoring completely unreasonable shipping costs.
Even our industry contacts, like EVGA and Asus, didn't bother holding on to any of these,
so they had nothing kicking around, 'cause why would they?
Fortunately though, we have awesome fans!
And after a Twitter post, Matt and Archer Grimes hooked us up
with these beautiful specimens.
Thanks guys!
So, the GeForce 7100 then.
A card that was basically a re-brand of the worst card on the market from the year 2004!
The GeForce 6200!
But now, with SLI.
So with a whopping 20 Watt power draw,
a blistering 350 megahertz core clock (wow),
and 300 Megahertz memory clock,
these things are only out-computed by the most experienced abacus users.
Hailed in their time as "only acceptable for office use" and "anything but sensible",
We're expecting running these cards in games to be about like taking your dad's lawn mower to Le Mans... and he's got a push mower.
So we tossed them in our system and... huh?
Where's the "Set SLI configuration" option?
I mean it says so on the web page, "SLI"!
Maybe it's Windows 10 screwing with our drivers.
But in Windows 7, it-it doesn't work either!
Documentation for running these guys in SLI is basically a couple of jokes about it from tech fourms from 10 years ago.
And then one German review website that did get it to work.
So there was still hope. After some more digging, we found out that only X58 boards and older
will work with the SLI driver, so rock on then! Time to--ah, crap!
Then while installing the board on our bench, one of the capacitors literally fell off its leads!
So, after stealing a similar enough one off of another dead motherboard,
and soldering it on, we were back in business, maybe.
It still wouldn't work!
After some more digging it turns out that maybe only 32-bit versions of Windows will support this old of SLI.
Making the 48 gigs of RAM in our system look a little [imbind] unnecessary, but we decided to leave it all in there anyway,
'cause it looks cool. In the end, almost #OutOfIdeas, we blew off the dust off of our CD drive,
burned ourselves a copy of Windows XP 32-bit and spent a morning in driver compatibility hell,
until finally... Yes, finally! We had the pinnacle of piss-poor PC performance.
So first we tried some games using one of the 7100s to set a baseline,
where it performed about as well as you'd expect.
One and a half FPS in 3DMark 2006,
like 10 in Crysis,
and actually, a pretty good experience in Halo: Combat Evolved,
and well over 60 frames per second in 3DMark 2001 SE.
So we were hopeful about its performance with SLI enabled.
Until, well, everything crashed. Almost immediately.
3DMark 2001, 2006, Halo, Crysis and Half-Life 2.
The SLI performance of this machine completely exceeded our expectations, for how crap it would be.
Truly, the definition of unplayable.
The only 3D object that wouldn't crash the computer immediately was the 3D Text screen saver, and even that had stuttering issues.
And we aren't talking soft crashes here. You open a game, BOOM! and you'll be reaching for the reset switch.
We tried a bunch of different drivers from 91.45 all the way up to 307,
since we wanted to at least have one game to work,
so we could compare performance, and they all immediately died with SLI enabled.
So you might be asking yourself, then, "Why bother releasing this video at all?"
Well, I guess it's because we learned some things along the way that we felt were important to pass along.
One:
Driver support for 11-year-old graphics cards... isn't great.
Number two:
Windows XP isn't as good as we all remember it being!
Number three:
Capacitors can fall off old motherboards pretty easily, then can be fixed pretty easily.
And finally, four:
Holy sweet sh*tballs!
Whatever you do, don't run the 7100 GS in SLI.
You're welcome.
Ting is the mobile carrier that is focused on customer service and customer satisfaction.
First, you don't speak to a robot when you call customer service at Ting,
you get put through directly to a person and somehow they managed that,
with an average Ting bill for their customers out there of only 23 bucks a month,
per device. Because Ting is all about the concept of paying for only what you use.
So this is cool: you go on to their website, we've got a link below-linus.ting.com,
And you try out the savings calulator. You enter your last few bills with your current carrier,
and how much data and talk time you used, and it spits out whether you'd save money on Ting.
And if you would save money on Ting, they would actually cover 25% of your cancellation fee out of the existing contract,
up to 75 dollars, and if you use our link down below,
you'll also get 25 bucks in service credit, or towards a new device.
So go try it out, that's linus.ting.com.
So thanks for watching guys, if you disliked this video, you can hit that button, but if you liked it, hit the like button, get subscribed, maybe consider checking out where to-
buy a new graphics card in the video description.
Also down there is our merch store where you can buy cool shirts like this one, and our community forum which you should totally join.