Calling anyone with Tri-Sli GTX480's Going from 2 to 3 480's - Worth It?

[nickrose]

Hi All,

Can anyone with Tri-Sli GTX480's please help.

I have 2 EVGA GTX480 SC's (Ek Waterblocks) and a 280GTX Physx.
The 480's I have overclock nicely to 886Mhz with a little more voltage.

Does Tri-Sli scale well on the 480's?

Will I see much improvement in games?

I have the chance of another one, and the main question is wether it will be worth the investment?

Edit: I have a 1200w PSU so power wont be a problem.

Thanks in Advance.

 

[nbkpsycho]

What resolution? Surely it would be better to sell your 480's and put some cash towards it to get 2x 570's?

 

[harmony]

In some games it's worth it, e.g. The Witcher 2 max (with Ubersampling), Metro 2033 max etc, which will make an obvious difference between sub 60fps and full 60 fps. The scaling is great in GPU-bounded games, but crap in CPU-bounded games, so be prepared.

If you play at higher resolution then I don't recommend investing more money into a setup with only 1.5GB vram per GPU as of end of 2011.

 

[Surveyor]

There's a review of GTX 480's in 3 way SLI here which will hopefully give you some idea of how they scale.

If you go down that route you'll need to get rid of the GTX 280 unless you can get some single slot backplates.

 

[nickrose]

What resolution? Surely it would be better to sell your 480's and put some cash towards it to get 2x 570's?

Why? Everything I've read says go for the 480, the only improvement with the 570's is they draw less power and don't produce as much heat, both points are negated for me by water and a large psu.
Plus the 570's have less vram.

In some games it's worth it, e.g. The Witcher 2 max (with Ubersampling), Metro 2033 max etc, which will make an obvious difference between sub 60fps and full 60 fps. The scaling is great in GPU-bounded games, but crap in CPU-bounded games, so be prepared.

If you play at higher resolution then I don't recommend investing more money into a setup with only 1.5GB vram per GPU as of end of 2011.

Thanks, I game at 1920x1200, with a mix of gpu bound and cpu bound games.

Unless someone with a tri-sli setup can provide me with definate advantages, I'll stick with what I've got.

I cannot justify the cost of 2 GTX580's with waterblocks (best part of £1000) which would be the next logical step for the little benefit I will see.
I know I will recoup some cash from the sale of the 480's, but its still a lot of money.

 

[harmony]

Here are my simple tests at 1920x1200 regarding GTX580 TRI-SLI, which is similar as what you are considering:

Also, in some worst cases, in certain games, it is possible that the 1.5GB vram per GPU is a bottleneck of the raw GPU power, and I've done some rough tests there: http://www.evga.com/forums/tm.aspx?m=1273264

 

[nickrose]

Thanks Harmony, Kudos for the effort put in to running the tests.

Some real food for thought there, the EVGA link is interesting too.

I think the pure power of the 480's is more than enough for todays and the near futures games, but its the lack of Vram that is the stumbling block, especially if you want the eye candy turned on, most noteably for Crysis 2 and Battlefiels 3, which are the types of games I play most.

May have to bite the bullet and get a pair of 580's (3072Mb memory versions).

 

[fowler002]

Thanks Harmony, Kudos for the effort put in to running the tests.

Some real food for thought there, the EVGA link is interesting too.

I think the pure power of the 480's is more than enough for todays and the near futures games, but its the lack of Vram that is the stumbling block, especially if you want the eye candy turned on, most noteably for Crysis 2 and Battlefiels 3, which are the types of games I play most.

May have to bite the bullet and get a pair of 580's (3072Mb memory versions).

or wait for the new amd and nvida cards to be released.

 

[harmony]

Well to be honest you wouldn't notice any significant improvement by upgrading to a pair of GTX580 3GB, if you are not a fussy person who is very picky with lag spikes in a limited number of games at 1920x1200.

Though Kepler flagship is still far away, it's a hard choice. If you havent got the Sandy Bridge platform then I would have advised a full upgrade to the X79 platform, along with 3GB 580s.