Ok, before you ask ill answer the question.

No game in mind, just a current project to get best performance at low cost and PC has two 6 way power connectors, also needs to be pci connection.

Original card was gtx 8800, replaced by gtx 560. I would fit a second gtx 560 but it uses all the 6 way connectors.

So what graphics cards with sli (so can be connected together) and with one 6 way power socket would you recommend that will better the 560? Budget on ebay £30 each.

assuming your PSU can handle it - why not just get an adapter / splitter for power cables ?

if not I'd just get a new PSU


SLI doesn't give you as much of a boost as you'd think - they duplicate everything on the memory of both cards for a start, so if you use a 1Gb card and a 2Gb card you'll only get 1Gb of usable memory....


[Edited on 23/7/2016 by mcerd1]

Its a good way of heating your house in winter though! I also run a 560 and was looking at going SLI. Decided against and ended up with a overclocked 980. Certainly not £30 though.....

I'm on a overclocked 970 - its a lot cheaper than the 980 but you have to treat it like a 3.5Gb card not the full 4Gb as 500Mb of the ram is a slower speed.... (still way more powerful than the 1Gb GTX285 it replaced)

I did wonder about a splitter for the second card, not sure but i think ive seen an adapter for disk drive power to 6 way plug.

And i forgot to mention psu.
It is 750 w, has 2 wd 10k rpm disks, 4 gb ram, ( may up it to 8gb), creative sound card and cd rom drive, usb wifi dongle, lan, mouse and keybd. Probably enough spare juice for second card?

There is a 1000w psu available but that is quite a lot, probably better off looking at a single higher performance card.

newer cards either give better performance at same power or same performance at lower power so could use 2 of them.

650 card is slughtly better than 560 but has one power plug, is reasonably price but cant run two as has no bridge.

An update in case anyone is interested.

Info on nvidia site inicates max power for 560 card is 150 w.

The two 12 v supplies are rated at 18 a so either has enough oomf for one card, actual power required from them should be less as the card will take some from pci edge connector.

Current thinking is to use two splitters in each supply and supply both cards, the two 12v supplies to a card must be separate.

What can possibly go wrong???!

I'll have a 560 going spare in about two days if you want one!!!!

An upate. The numbers seemed to indicate power supply would cope with two cards so after spending quite a few hours making power splitters, as seen in photo below, i threw caution to the wind and plugged in both cards with sli bridge..

Nothing exploded nor was there smoke .... which is good.

Running 3d test the fps increased by 40 or 60 percent depending on the test. Only downside is the fan (cpu or psu?) can be heard getting louder i.e. working harder during the test.