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Can I run my current MSI Limited Golden Gaming Edition GTX 970 4GB and a GTX 550 Ti together with an SLI bridge?

The GTX 550 Ti doesn't require another power connector but pulls power off the motherboard.

pratt_korp
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Daniel
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    It wouldn't do you much good. The performance would be limited by the 550 ti – Ramhound May 21 '15 at 00:27
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    Anyways...They have to be the same GPU otherwise they the faster one will be downclocked and the same amount of RAM otherwise the card with more memory will have the lower amount of vram. SLI and Crossfire work by a single pool of memory. So if you have two 4GB cards you have 4GB of vram in SLI. read up on how SLI works before you invest money in a 970 and tried to connected it to a 550....horrible idea – Ramhound May 21 '15 at 00:35
  • hadnt even tried it. my friend was wanting to trade it and i wanted to see if if would boost my fps at all. thx – Daniel May 21 '15 at 00:39
  • It won't Its literally not worth it. If it works, and thats a big if, your talking about 4 generation gap here, it would make the 970 slower. I am to busy to explain it, so here is a video, of a [geek](http://superuser.com/questions/88263/how-to-enable-autologon-in-windows-7/88264#88264) – Ramhound May 21 '15 at 01:06
  • The performance gap would be too great for it to be useful, what you could do though is ignore the SLi and use the 550 as a Physx card for games that support it. – Mokubai May 21 '15 at 05:47

1 Answers1

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This is not possible. From the NVIDIA FAQ page on SLI:

Can I mix and match graphics cards that have different GPUs?

No. For example, an XXXGT cannot be paired with a XXXGTX in an SLI configuration.

While the NVIDIA example isn't particularly well explained, they do make it clear that different GPU architectures are unable to be used in SLI.

As others have mentioned in the comments, even if this SLI configuration were possible it would limit the GTX 970 from maximum performance.

There is another option: You could use the GTX 550 Ti as a dedicated PhysX card. While the benefits of this are limited primarily to games using PhysX, it is a potential solution if you really want to have both cards in your system.

Even in this configuration, it is possible for the dedicated PhysX card to bottleneck your system. Again, this depends on the graphics cards being used. It is worth experimenting with, however, as most of the information out there is on forums, with users commenting on whether or not they think performance increases or decreases!

For example, one user on Reddit suggested that when they used a 970 with a 580, they still lost performance. Another user suggested that, in their experience, for a 970 to benefit from a dedicated PhysX card that is a GTX 670 (equivalent or better) should be used.

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