Looking to buy a new/refub dell on ebay. What is SLI ( Dual video cards ) but what does this do? My wife builds web pages, and wants more graphics power. Will this help? I suspect this is for gaming?

Any help would be appreciated


PS what is better DDR2@ 533 or 667 memory?

SLI stands for Scalable Link Interface (back in the 3Dfx Voodoo days it was Scan-Line Interleave). This is used mainly for gaming as it basically uses the multiple cards to render each frame of video, thus combining the 'horsepower' to speed up frame rates. (note: this is an extremely simple explanation...there is a lot more to it, which you can read about here.

In short, it will not help your wife very much at all (unless she's a gamer). If you want to help her more in the graphic design area, some things you want to look for are:

1. A good amount of RAM. Depending on the work she wants to do, you want at least 1 GB of RAM. When it comes to RAM, more is usually better.

2. A large monitor or even two monitors. One thing you can never have enough of when doing graphics work is monitor space. Most current video cards have dual monitor connections on them. So you wouldn't need two video cards to accomplish this.

To answer your other question:

667 is better....well, faster.

Hey thanks,

There was Dell XPS with Dual 19" monitors. I think I'll get that. Neither of us play games online, so I think I'll skip the SLI, and go with 2 gigs of ram. I heard you need at least 1GB per core. As I'm going with a 3.gz or better dual core processor.

I haven't heard that about having 1GB per core....but hey, more RAM = better anyway.

The dual 19" inch monitors will be sweet for graphics work.