- On September 17th, 2020
claimed yet another victim. Now NVIDIA's SLI technology,
which allows you to use more than one graphics card to increase your FPS in games
was already on life support with lackluster support
from game developers and NVIDIA slowly pulling
support from more and more of their cards. But the final nail in
the coffin was of course this blog post on NVIDIA's website stating that they would no longer
develop SLI profiles for future cards at all or for
their past cards past January of 2021. Curiously though, the
RTX 3090 NVIDIA's latest and absolute greatest does
have an NVLink connector which as of last
generation is the connector that we use for SLI, which
hasn't been explicitly disabled. So theoretically, in the handful of games
that do natively support it we should be able to run SLI on this card. Raising the question of course, given how CPU bottlenecked this is on any kind of mere mortal
monitor will a second RTX 3090 even make any difference? I legitimately don't know. I have intentionally cloistered myself and not looked at anyone
else's videos on the subject. Just like I haven't looked
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to throw two of NVIDIA's chungus founder's edition
RTX 3090s in here and see just how well this through
card blowy thing works when you've got two of them
stacked on top of each other. I wasn't able to get another one of those. So we're going with a Asus's
ROG Strix gaming RTX 3090. Now I don't actually
know much about this card other than that Asus did
apparently manage to dodge the whole fiasco with
like bad board components causing crashes and stuff like that. So, good job Asus, you done good. She's a heavy boy for sure. So we've got a three fan
configuration with counter flow. So that's that this one
has spinning clockwise, the others are spinning counterclockwise something, something turbulence. We actually do, oh, that's interesting, we do have a little bit of
through the card blowiness here. Sort of it's a much more
traditionally shaped PCB but the cooler actually extends
for a, that looks like a good couple of inches
past the edge of the card. Now you might've noticed I
didn't take the plastic peels off this one. That's 'cause this one's
gotta go back to Asus. Funny story, they were
like, "Hey, be real careful with that one because it's
literally the only one we have and we to do some stuff with it." You know the product is in shortage when even the manufacturer
does not have any. Fun fact about our
system configuration here the MSI Z490 GODLIKE was
literally the only motherboard in our studio that was capable of handling this configuration. Not because we didn't
have any other boards with four slots spacing slot spacing, which is what we need, at least in order to have any room
for the top card to breathe, but because it was the only
Intel based one that had that. And trust me, I love Ryzen
as much as anyone does at this point, but if you're
running two RTX 3090s, you are going to need the
fastest possible gaming CPU which for now anyway is the 10900K. This is fricking nuts. Like, look at this. The whole bottom of the
case is full of graphics. I love that these fans
are going to be blowing right into this bottom card. This one, good shape for cooling. This one, well might be okay. It's not really the best case for this, but we're just gonna leave it open. So it gets enough air flow. Hey, we might have a slight problem. - [Alex] Yeah? Oh yeah. - We got four eight pin connectors and that's not enough today. Each of these needs three eight
pin PCI express connectors that has gotten to be overkill. - [Alex] Do you think the power supply will be good enough? - What's in here? - [Alex] 1000 watts Seasonic. - I have my doubts. - [Alex] It was able to run
four GV-100s for months. - Yeah, I still have my doubts. Cable me. - [Alex] Nice catch. - This is NVIDIA's NVLink bridge four slot for 30 series products. Yes my friend NVIDIA, friend. Yeah, I guess I don't have
friends plural anyway. Yes my friend, NVIDIA has changed the NVLink connector again. So it's basically one
card, one NVLink connector. This one is actually keyed differently and has I think double the
bandwidth over the last one? - [Alex] Maybe.
- [Nick] Yes. So wait, at what point
did NVLink replace SLI in terms of branding? - It didn't. SLI was and continues to be
the branding for multiple cards working together for gaming. NVLink is just the name of
this communication protocol and connector, which happens
to be much much faster than the original SLI finger and even the high bandwidth bridges that NVIDIA introduced later on. The reason it was developed
was not for gaming, it was actually for their like AI and like data center products but, if they were gonna build
this high speed interconnect you might as well put it on
the gaming cards as well. Is what I'm assuming the thinking was. NVLink is so much faster
than the SLI interface was that it can even allow their other cards to pool their memory together
and work on much bigger jobs. We actually talked about
this in more detail in this video right here. Aight, please tell me
it's just gonna boot up. Wow. That is very sharp RGB. And NVIDIA control panel, dual 4090s, they show up, SLI boom. There it is. It may be dead, but here's
it's shambling corpse. With that out of the way,
let's have a look at the wide selection of SLI ready
games that we can enjoy. Shadow of the Tomb
Raider, Civilization VI, Sniper Elite 4, Gears of War 4, Ashes of the Singularity:
Escalation, Strange Brigade, Rise of the Tomb Raider,
Zombie Army 4: Dead War, Hitman, Deus Ex: Mankind Divided,
Battlefield 1, Halo Wars. Oh, that's all the DitectX 12 ones. Also in here are some
Vulcan games with support, including Red Dead
Redemption 2, Quake 2 RTX, Ashes of the Singularity:
Escalation, Strange Brigade and Zombie Army 4: Dead War. Dang it. Three of those are from the other list. They just support multiple APIs. So installed on this system, we have almost every SLI capable game. That is pretty rough looking. Where do you wanna start? Should we go straight
for one of my favorites, Shadow the Tomb Raider? Sure. But when we go for it,
we are going for it. I'm talking 4k absolutely maxed everything except motion blur, (beep) motion blur. - [Alex] Yeah. There's actually a thing
on the forum the other day talking about how people don't
think that you should hate on motion blur so much. - Really? - [Alex] Yeah, I don't get it. - Wow. They are both at 90 plus percent. That's pretty cool. So did you, can, you know what? No, I don't wanna run the benchmark yet. Can I just enjoy it for a little bit? - [Alex] Yeah. - This is the kind of gaming setup that even 10 years from now, most people will have never experienced. So I wanna at least try it out. That was some interesting
flicker right there. (Alex laughs) You piece (beep) you knew that
was gonna happen, didn't you? - [Alex] Yeah (laughs). - That was so anticlimactic Look how funny he thinks he is. - I even have it all set up. - No, don't go away. You're helping me plug this in. I probably should've seen that coming. Something to note is
that while 1000 watts is probably enough to
realistically power these cards under a sustained load, what's interesting about
the RTX 30 series is that it can experience sudden spikes in current that can actually trip the
over current protection of a power supply that on paper, seems like it should be
able to handle the load. So for years, NVIDIA and AMD both had been recommending power supplies that I would look at and I'd
go, "Ah, you can get away with less than that." But for the first time
I would actually say, you should probably go 20%
over their recommendation to make sure that you don't
experience something like that. Alright, let's try this again. And this game absolutely maxed out. Looks freaking incredible. What's more surprising to me
is the usage on these GPUs. Both of them are above 80% usage. That's crazy. You can really hear
'em ramping up already. Even at our lowest DPS, we're
not seeing any lower than 50 to 55 frames per second, which especially on a G-sync monitor, is gonna feel really fluid. Not quite as fluid as
if you just had one GPU doing it though. Which is interesting and well, part of why SLI is dead now. Now to measure a little more objectively we're gonna let frame
view run for 180 seconds while The Shadow of the
Tomb Raider benchmark runs its course here. And apparently I'll go
have a quick meeting with Nick light about our
merch stuff, lttstore.com. Look at this over there
with the Razor mask, - Hey what's up? - Hiding in the shadows - Hey. And the shadow of the tomb Raider. - [Nick] They call me shady guy. Before the benchmark's done actually, we've got a really good opportunity to check out our max power draw here. 'Cause Shadow of The Tomb
Raider is consuming anywhere from 85 and 100% of the
GPUS all the way to like 90 and 100%. So I did say before a thousand
watt was probably enough and it probably is. Remember that the power supply
isn't quite 100% efficient, even if it's 80 plus platinum or titanium, and this is draw from the wall. So realistically it's gonna be somewhere in the 950 watt range right now. That's right. There's finally a system
that actually needs 1000 watt power supply and
more for the spikes, you know. Crazy. Alex hasn't even finished
transcribing the numbers and I can already see the problem. While our 90th percentile
and 95th percentile numbers are way higher than a single GPU, it all falls apart in the 99th percentile. So what that means is that
90% of the time, SLI is damn near 70% faster than a single card. But 90% of the time, isn't what you feel when you're playing. 1% of the time, it dips down just as low, which is exactly those little
stutters that I was feeling when I was playing. - [Alex] Yeah there's the graph. - Here's a graph for the- Whatever we'll overlay it. Here's a graph, you guys
saw the graph already. Next game. It's always interesting to see
how games canned benchmarks can disagree with
NVIDIA's frame view tool. This says 86 FPS minimum,
that sounds pretty good. Frame view says 94. Wait, really? - [Alex] Yeah. Oh wow, well that's great. Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, if you're still playing
this game, SLI RTX 3090 looking like a pretty good option. While we fire up Red Dead Redemption, let's take a moment to appreciate the aura coming off of this machine. So here, we should move your laptop. It's going to get cooked
Alex, it's gonna get cooked. - [Alex] Oh, should I get the FLIR? - Yes. Before we get the thermal camera though I just wanna show you guys
where I can feel the heat of this machine from. Holy crap, I think I can still feel it. Definitely, here 100%. I mean, it's a thousand watts. It's like having a space
heater on your table. I should have half
expected the next result to balance out that good one. Red Dead Redemption 2, just
won't get past this black screen trying to load the game. So, so much for 15% of
the supported games list. - [Nick] Yeah. - To be clear there might be
some way to get it working but we're not gonna spend
any more time than that and neither should you. This is a really short benchmark
apparently, 30 seconds. Really hard to read frame
view with the in-game stats all up in my business. I just wanna see how much usage there is. Okay. The good news is it's working. The bad news is I still
can't see how much GPUs. But that's okay. 'Cause we brought the thermal camera. Wow, that top card is definitely
running a little hotter than the bottom one. 48.6 there got a cool 65 on the top. Dang. All right, summary time. That confirms what we thought we knew. SLI did nothing, it
actually made it worse. Yay SLI. What's next? - [Nick] That's all of
our pre-done benchmarks. - That's as far as we got,
honestly, I'm good with that. None of these other ones, you know what? Let's just play Quake 2 RTX for fun then. What do you think? The most overkill Quake
2 machine of all time. It's so warm. All right. So we've got eight freaking reflections. How has our GPU usage? Actually not bad. GPU two sitting at about 80%
here, ladies and gentlemen. That's pretty cool. Please die please die. Is he dead? I can't tell. He dead. Okay, here we go. Oh, come on. I'm down to like 19 health. I'm just gonna, I'm running for it. I'm running for it here boys. I'm running for it, we're going, we're go- Get out of the way. All right, forget it. I'm out. But you should do the heat test, you should do the heat test. I can feel it from here. Like easily, like flip
your hands around now. - K yeah. - Yeah, that's what I thought. - [Nick] How much is drawing
just in Quake right now? - Let's have a look. It's still maxed out at 1022. In quake it's sitting at... I'm gonna assume it's lower
than Shadow of the Tomb Raider. I suspect it's not doing much on CPU. 908 Watts. - [Alex] That's quite a bit. You know what else is quite a bit? Your patience with my
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