 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 at who's our sponsor. Ah, there it is, Ridge Wallet. Ridge Wallet wants to redefine the wallet with its compact frame and RFID blocking plates. Check out how they can keep your wallet bulge down and use offer code Linus to save 10% and get free worldwide shipping. As much as I would have loved to throw two of Nvidia's chungus founders 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 Asus' 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. Oh, she's a heavy boy for sure. So we've got a three fan configuration with counter flow. So that's that this one is 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, 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 have 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, 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 gonna 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 airflow. Hey, we might have a slight problem. 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 got to be overkill. Do you think the power supply will be good enough? What's in here? 1000 watts of Sonic. I have my doubts. It was able to run four GB 100s for months. Yeah, I still have my doubts. Cable me. Nice catch. This is Nvidia's NVLink Bridge 4 slot for 30 series products. Yes, my friend Nvidia friend. I guess I don't have friends plural anyway. Yes, my friend Nvidia has changed the NVLink connector again. So it's basically, you know, one card, one NVLink connector. This one is actually keyed differently and has I think doubled the bandwidth over the last one. Maybe. So wait, 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. All right, please tell me it's just gonna boot up. Wow, that is very sharp TV. And Nvidia control panel, dual 4090s, they show up, SLI. Boom, there it is. It may be dead, but here's its 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, Nightmare Elite IV, Gears of War IV, Ashes of the Singularity Escalation, Strange Brigade, Rise of the Tomb Raider, Zombie Army IV, Dead War Hitman, Deus Ex, Mankind Divided, Battlefield 1 and Halo Wars. Oh, that's all the DirectX 12 ones. Also in here are some Vulcan games with support, including Red Dead Redemption 2 and Quake II RTX, Ashes of the Singularity Escalation, Strange Brigade and Zombie Army IV, 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, ooh, that is pretty rough looking. Where do you wanna start? Should we go straight for one of my favorites, Shadow of 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, fuck motion blur. 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? 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? Yeah, give her. 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. Oh. Oh. You piece of shit, you knew that was gonna happen, didn't you? Yeah. 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 these in. I probably should have 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 overcurrent 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 have 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. All right, 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 them ramping up already. Even at our lowest dips, we're not seeing any lower than 52, 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 guy over there with the Razer mask hiding in the shadows, the shadow of the Tomb Raider. Before the benchmark's done actually, we've got a really good opportunity to check out our max power draw here, because 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 a thousand watt power supply and more for the spikes, you know? 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. Yeah, there's the graph. Yeah, there's the graph. Here's a graph for the, well, whatever, we'll overlay it. There's a graph, you guys saw the graph already. Next game. It's always interesting to see how games can benchmarks can disagree with Nvidia's frame view tool. This says 86 FPS minimum, that sounds pretty good. Frame view says, 94, wait, really? 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 gonna get cooked, Alex, it's gonna get cooked. Oh, should we get the clear? I wanna go, 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. 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 GPU usage there is, but that's okay, because 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? That's all of our pre-done benchmark. 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? It's the most overkill Quake 2 machine of all time. It's so warm. All right, so we've got eight freaking reflections. How's our GPU? Actually not bad. GPU 2 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 going. 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. Yeah, that's what I thought. How much are you 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. That's quite a bit. You know what else is quite a bit? Your patience with my segues to our sponsors. Micro Center is open to supply all of your technology needs, whether you're work from home or learn from home. Check out their PowerSpec desktop lineup, featuring Intel 10th Gen processors, available in a wide variety of configurations, including Nvidia RTX graphics and anywhere from 16 to 32 gigs of RAM. They've got all the latest tech and you can check them out along with other Micro Center specials at the link in the video description. If you guys enjoyed this video and you love this kind of like graphics insanity, maybe check out, I don't know, we haven't shouted it out in a while. How about 16K gaming?