For those who do not know about these technologies: SLI has been introduced years ago by 3Dfx, when they enabled us to connect two of the same graphic cards with SLI bridge and get way better gaming performance than just with one card. A long time has passed since then and multi GPU solutions were not in use until a few years ago. Now multi GPU scaling has evolved to a level when it is reasonable to use it - in some cases even financially speaking. There are no major differences between SLI and Crossfire, that would be worth mentioning, besides that with Nvidia you can have 3 cards working together instead of "only" two. All you need to know is that Crossfire belongs to ATI and SLI to Nvidia (since they bought 3Dfx years ago) and that not all motherboards support both of them. Now let's concentrate on possible problems with these technologies:

Motherboard/chipset capabilities As you probably already know, your motherboard has to have at least two PCI-e slots to plug in two video cards and use them in multi-GPU scaling mode (these must be at least PCI-e 4x - PCI-e 2x are for peripheral cards only). Problem here is, that not all chipsets enable you to use both PCI-e slots at full speed at the same time. If your chipset supports at least 2x PCI-e at 8x speed, you should generally not be concerned about setting up a Crossfire/SLI setup. However, some chipsets can run only primary PCI-e slot at full speed, while the secondary switches to PCI-e 4x mode and in this case performance can be seriously diminished. That is why you should always check capabilities of your motherboard before buying it, if you are planning to use multiple video cards in your system.

• Drivers and driver settings

  Because a multi GPU system is much more complicated to run, these systems usually have more problems than normal ones. Manufacturers simply can not write drivers, that would always work flawlessly and with multi GPU systems this really shows. It happens very often, that when a new game is launched, it has problems with multiple GPUs (it can show in low performance or in image corruption) and you have to wait until new drivers come out to play it normally or at least to get your computer's full potential. Sometimes manufacturers even launch a driver, which is specially marked as being fixed for compatibility with some new game. So, please, if you are having problems on a SLI/Crossfire based system and you have not updated drivers for a while, DO IT. Another point worth mentioning is that sometimes new drivers can be the reason for problems - do not always stick with the latest ones if you notice that something is wrong.

• Settings

  Crossfire or SLI could be disabled in your driver's control panel. Check your Catalyst Control center if you have an ATI video card, or check Nvidia control panel if your GPU was made by Nvidia.
  

• SLI/Crossfire bridge
  

  If Crossfire or SLI on your system is permanently disabled and you can not enable it by any means, please check if SLI/CF bridge is physically installed in your computer. It is supposed to be connecting the two video cards.

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