In this easy to follow guide, Phil will show you everything you need to know in order to build a kick-ass NVIDIA SLI PC. From selecting the right parts, to building the system and successfully powering it on, to installing the correct drivers and enabling NVIDIA SLI technology—we cover it all. Read on and watch our videos to get started!
What is SLI?
Phil introduces us to the basics of NVIDIA SLI.
SLI-ready!
What does the SLI-ready logo mean?
What do we need to get started?
The basic components of an SLI PC.
Pairing graphics cards for SLI
Do my SLI graphics cards have to be from the same manufacturer? How about clock speeds?
Part Selection
The best way to find great deals, the best pricing and huge selection is to go online to the SLI Marketplace on SLIZone. Click here to visit the SLI Marketplace. With that, let’s look at all the parts we need for our SLI PC.
SLI-Ready Motherboard First, select the backbone of your SLI PC: The nForce SLI motherboard. The motherboard we’re using for this build is powered by an NVIDIA nForce 590SLI MCP. Motherboards featuring this MCP have many of great features like automatic overclocking out of the box, six SATA ports for your RAID array, Dual GigE Ethernet ports for twice the network bandwidth…and more. nForce SLI-Ready motherboards are available for both Intel and AMD processors.
Graphics Cards Next, you’ll want to grab a pair of SLI-Ready graphics cards. Remember, while you *can* choose 2 graphics cards from different manufacturers featuring different clock speeds, we *must* make sure that the GPU models are the same. For sake of symmetry, we chose 2 SLI-ready graphics cards from the same graphics card manufacturer. For this build, we chose 2 MSI graphics cards powered by a GeForce 7900 GT GPU – these are a great price/performance example, and within most gamers’ budgets.
SLI-Ready Power Supply Antec NEO-HE 550 This power supply will be able to handle all this hardware and more.
SLI-Ready memory (4) Corsair DDR2 XMSmemory modules.
These modules are good for 512 MB of RAM each, giving us a cool 2 Gigs to use for our SLI PC.
Hard Drive
(3) Western Digital RaptorX 150GB 10,000RPM We are going to use 3 of these and set them up as a RAID5.
CPU Intel Core 2 Duo Extreme 2.9Ghz Intel's top gaming CPU is extremely fast and highly overclockable
Cooling Zalman CNPS-9500 This pure copper cooler is quiet and an excellent performer.
Case Antec Nine Hundred This case is all about cooling.
Mouse and Keyboard Logitech MX518 mouse and Logitech G15 keyboard An absolutely killer input device combination
Now that we’ve selected all the correct parts to build your SLI PC, it's time to put it all together! Check out the next chapter of this DIY series to learn how to build your new NVIDIA SLI PC.
