got a couple quick Q's -- building a new computer....
the only game i have on my pc now is GTA 3 which i never play and Counter Strike 1.6 which i play online.
in short, im building a new rig and i want to be able to play games on it, but will mostly be used as a work computer for which I do lots of photoshop work and video rendering. My budget for video is about 300-400, and wanted to know if, [for gaming] 2 lower-end cards [say, 2 8600-series cards] running in SLI would be better than one 8800GTS [cant afford the GTX! ] and, if crossfire is better, considering some nforce board chipsets are finnicky and intel hasnt been licensed by nvidia so all intel boards are crossfire [and their new X38(?) chipset looks good.]
In short with the current crop of games out you would be better off going with a good high end card because most games engines dont really take full advantage of SLI or Crossfire, also SLI as proven to be better then Crossfire. On SLI one card does the even lines and the other does the odd lines, Crossfire is divided by one card does the upper half of the screen and the other does the lower? So on Crossfire if 1 card is getting hit with more pixels then the other card has to slow down, this happens a lot in most games.
i think you're backwards. SLI does half/half of the screen and only horizontally as well as alternate-frame rendering, whereas x-fire can do half/half both horizontally and vertically..x-fire can also do alternate frame rendering, but the odd/even checkerboard effect [per frame] of Crossfire is what most people use.
i thought by the title he was asking if anyone has games on there computer or plays them, so back off.