With the average viewer on this site looking for a budget way to make a powerful system, I couldn’t help but post something on how to save you money on graphics cards. Many of today’s AMD/ATI GPUs support Crossfire while Nvidia GPUs support SLI. These technologies allow the consumer to use two or more of the same graphics cards together, treating them as one card. Multiple cheap GPUs is a much better choice than one expensive, powerful card.

Not only could you use two cheaper cards together and get the power of a more expensive card, but you also have more control over the specs of your graphics system. Say you want a budget graphics system with a decent speed and 2GB of memory (not entirely, just 1GB for one set of shaders and 1GB for the other set). While you’re looking online, you can’t find a card for a low enough price with 2GB of memory. However, you find a cheap card that has an alright speed and 1GB of memory and is SLI/Crossfire ready. You could purchase two, connect them together and get the kind of system you wanted for a much lower price.

However, in order to use Crossfire/SLI your motherboard must support it.

Next time that you go to get a new graphics system keep this in mind.