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580 or 480 oc??? (SLI)

Geekazoid

Geekazoid

Geekazoid

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Joined
19 Jun 2009
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904
I game at 1920x1080...

I want all games to run smoothly at max settings with all the bells and whistles AA etc...

Shall I get the 480 SOC SLI or the 580 SLI...

Also just a wee question I have 3 pci express sockets on my mobo and if I purchase the 480 OC SLI theY require a pci socket in-between them both due to the cooling solution but my lower PCI socket is not X16 but X8 does this make a difference to performance in games...

Much thanks all...

[EDIT] also can my powersupply handle 2 480's in SLI??
 
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a 750w psu is going to be pushing it for those two cards. Both the 480 and 580 pull roughly the same amount of juice, 300w at game load (Furmark hits higher, but then again it's a torture test). Most on the forums recommend at least a decent 600w for a single one. The rule of thumb for those cards is if you add another 250-300w on top for each card that should give you an idea on what the system'll be pulling, which puts it right on the edge of your supply's capabilities. True, you have a Corsair, but running two cards on that is asking for trouble, shortening the lifespan of the supply as well as possibly reducing performance/overclocking due to there being no overhead. Get two 480s, and use the money you'd saved from the two 580s on a more powerful PSU.

As long as you're running a PCIe 2.0 motherboard, going from 16x to 8x will not really be noticeable. You might lose +- 5% performance, but with the amount of power you'll be getting from those two beauties it probably won't matter at that point =)
 
At 1080p surely a single 580 will max everything. I know overkill is good, but you'd need to use a higher resolution screen to see the benefit of such a monster SLI setup.
 
I had a 480 and now running a 580, below is a rough power consumption of my system with the 480 installed:

615W Furmark & Prime
405w Prime only
503w Furmark Only
272w Idle

With the 580 I pull 500w with Prime and Furmark running.
 
personally i'd buy a 480gtx and sli it later. I'm waiting on picking up a cheap 480gtx some time soon. but you will realisticaly want a quality 850w or preferably 950w.
 
old gamer said:
i know they are cheap at the mo but the 480's power usage would put me off
Click to expand...

Either way you're probably going to need some form of PSU upgrade for SLI I would have thought. The 580's power usage appears (according to Anandtech) to be roughly similar to that of the 480, so to be fair if you're considering either power usage should probably be a non-issue for you (570 SLI pulls 740w at full load, that's about as close as you can get).
That's the trade off of going high-end Nvidia. Anything above a GTX560 will be pulling a large amount of juice.

It's noise and temperatures (not to mention stock performance) which puts the 580 at a higher pegging than the 480, and the Gigabyte cooler on the 480SE and SoC puts paid to that too, running cool and allowing overclocks to equal a 580 anyway. Go for the 480 is my recommendation.
 
RJC said:
I had a 480 and now running a 580, below is a rough power consumption of my system with the 480 installed:

615W Furmark & Prime
405w Prime only
503w Furmark Only
272w Idle

With the 580 I pull 500w with Prime and Furmark running.
Click to expand...

A bit artificial comparison no ? As doesn't the 580 deliberately limit power ANC performance in furmark ?
 
Buckster said:
A bit artificial comparison no ? As doesn't the 580 deliberately limit power ANC performance in furmark ?
Click to expand...

To a fashion, but how many of us going to circumnavigate the power limiter on the card. I gave a rough guide to what a power draw of the card is during certain stress test programs.

I usually put a note in mentioning this, perhaps I should remember in the future.
 
^^ agreed RJC - but what I meant was that in Furmark the 580 will seem much lower powered vs the 480 - and often people use that to show that under load in games etc- the 580 is much more efficient than the 480

wheras in games - the limiter won't be in place of course, and it'll be an even playing field - in which case the 580 will be more efficient than the 480 - but not by a lot ? I think about 15% or so from remembering ?

therefore in reality power wise in games not a lot between the 480 and 580 really ? 580 just had higher clock speeds, nicer cooler etc etc
 
Buckster said:
^^ agreed RJC - but what I meant was that in Furmark the 580 will seem much lower powered vs the 480 - and often people use that to show that under load in games etc- the 580 is much more efficient than the 480

wheras in games - the limiter won't be in place of course, and it'll be an even playing field - in which case the 580 will be more efficient than the 480 - but not by a lot ? I think about 15% or so from remembering ?

therefore in reality power wise in games not a lot between the 480 and 580 really ? 580 just had higher clock speeds, nicer cooler etc etc
Click to expand...

I mainly used Furmark - I say this loosely to put maximum load on the cards and use as a base line, I was going to test during gaming but never got round to do it on the 480 which I don't own any more.

I always thought the limiter was always active on the 580, that's why there was a special version of GPU-Z which disabled the limiter.

But At the end of the day the testing was only a rough guide to see what the maximum my pc would draw in the very worse scenario without doing any major changes :)
 
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