do you need SLI or Xfire to run the double core GPUs?

Okay let me clear this up for you. There is obviously a lack of understanding toward those people that have said that you don't need it for 2 cores but you do for 2 cards as this is actually correct.

Allow me to explain...

There are cards in production that are one Graphics processor and its onboard memory which are SLI or Crossfire capable. This means that provided you have a compatible motherboard you can have 2 or more of these cards and link them up so they work together in the same machine. The most common high end cards these days can all do this.

Now, there are also cards in production which have 2 graphics processors on the one card. I believe they share the 'on card' GDDR RAM memory between them. These cards can also usually link with others inside your system for extra power much like their single GPU counterparts however alone they do not need an SLI or Crossfire enabled motherboard to run as the GPUs (cores) are linked to eachother on the card using the same technology as SLI / Crossfire.

So in short, no the x2 cards do not need an SLI or Crossfire motherboard to run. You can pick one up and pop it into a single card system. This is part of the reason theyre so good. You get SLI / Crossfire performance without having to buy 2 cards or upgrade your motherboard.

No they are SLi and CrossFire compatible, they don't need to be set up this way for them to work. What SLi and Xfire is, is a way to connect two cards together so they can both run at the same time and break up the graphics processing between them so they don't have to work as hard. You can have as many cores as you want no one card and they wont require another card to be able to use them (might need a better connection then PCIe x16 though for something extremely powerful).

And no there is no GPU card out there that needs to be hooked up with SLi or Xfire to be able to work. But to use SLi or Xfire you need a compatible motherboard.

No, you don't.

The GTX295 is two video cards in one and it uses SLI for both cards to work. However, you do not need an SLI motherboard for this as it has an onboard chip that runs SLI.

What I mean by this is that in order for both GPUs to work, you need to have SLI enabled in the video card options once you have the drivers installed. The GTX295, even though it has 2 GPU cores, can still run on any motherboard supporting PCI-E slots even if SLI is not compatible with that motherboard.

The GTX285, 275, 260; and the HD4870, 4890, and 4870 are all single-core video cards and do not need SLI/CF to run at full capacity; unless you want to of course and have two video cards =).

I hope this helps!

Good Question, Simply no. If it is one card you don't need an SLI or CrossFire capable motherboard to use the card.

no, sli and crossfire are both used only for running dual cards, not for cores..