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I have two cards:

  1. GeForce GTX 460
  2. GeForce GT 8600

Would it be possible to have these running simultaneous? Would it be best to have it running with SLI or simply with two drivers?

Hennes
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Marcus Hansson
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3 Answers3

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There shouldn't be any problems running the two cards together with NVIDIA's drivers, but as others have mentioned, SLI won't work.

You could use one card for physX and one for video as explained here.

Community
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AndrejaKo
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  • Interesting thread, thanks for the tips. Marking yours as the answer. – Marcus Hansson Apr 09 '11 at 19:40
  • Well, yeah but the 8600m GT hasn't got the chops to function as a PhysX PPU – Sathyajith Bhat Apr 10 '11 at 05:51
  • @Sathya♦ No. According to [PhysX FAQ](http://www.nvidia.com/object/physx_faq.html#q3) and [NVIDIA CUDA Programming Guide](http://developer.download.nvidia.com/compute/cuda/2_3/toolkit/docs/NVIDIA_CUDA_Programming_Guide_2.3.pdf) GeForce 8600 is capable of running as PhysX card. Also, I don't see from where you got the m part. From what I can see, OP isn't running a laptop and would be using the more powerful non-m version. Furthermore I have a card with similar compute capabilities (9500M GS) and have no problems running PhysX or CUDA on it. – AndrejaKo Apr 10 '11 at 10:03
  • tbh the 9500 is quite a lot faster than the 8600 series. – Sathyajith Bhat Apr 10 '11 at 16:51
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You can run different cards in SLI with drivers patched with DifferentSLI Auto. But the first three characters of the PCI device ID must match, and in your case this would not work.

https://github.com/EmberVulpix/DifferentSLIAuto/releases

Muh Fugen
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You won't be able to SLI them two, you can only run two identical cards in SLI, so wither 2 x 8600's or two GTX 460's obviously running 2 8600's is still less powerful than the GTX 460, so either make your next upgrade another 460 for SLI but obviously a lot more power and heat or go for the GTX 500 series or the future 600 series.

Sandeep Bansal
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  • Okey, but would it be possible to have them running with separate drivers? Without SLI, that is. – Marcus Hansson Apr 09 '11 at 17:58
  • No since they both use the same Nvidia drivers, if you had an ATI Card then you would be able to patch the Nvidia drivers for it to be usable side by side with the ATI card mainly for use with Physx and CUDA, but I believe your card is just about in the range to actually do this. – Sandeep Bansal Apr 09 '11 at 18:09