My fault? hardly. It turned out that the latest Nvidia drivers stopped my fans going over 75%, had broken shader support and messed up shadows, and put an incredibly bad load on my GPUs (that was obviously the game, though).
In summation when you are trying to sit down and enjoy a game, ONE problem is too many problems.
And I don't give a rat's who you are you are never ever going to have 100% smooth sailing trouble free gaming on SLI or Crossfire, even if your name is King golden bumcheeks.
The way your computer looks didn't make up for the fact that (I'm making an assumption here) you jumped on a new driver before knowing if it had problems. Had you not done so, this situation wouldn't occur. 99% of driver problems can be fixed by not instantly jumping to every new driver released just because its there.
You also forgot one major point in your main argument in the last paragraph, if doesn't matter who you are, what your name is or what computer/software you have, you will NEVER have 100% smooth sailing trouble free gaming on SLI, xfire, single AMD card, single Nvidia card, OR consoles.
Single cards have driver problems, games have problems themselves, and consoles trouble free is one of those deluded things people think, yet aside from remembering the RROD, and the PS3 version of that(yellow something of death iirc?), I've played PS3's, and 360's that have crashed, I've played both and had saves corrupted, I've seen plenty of people RMA consoles due to faulty drives not reading games anymore, consoles dying for other reasons.
To date I've used SLI and Xfire multiple times, and single cards in most generations also, I've experienced a few games in which sli/xfire weren't working perfectly on launch, disabling xfire means....... no more trouble than single cards. I've experienced more trouble with games having their own issues than SLI, xfire, single cards all put together. Fallout 3 itself, with NO hardware or driver issues has crashed more times than probably ALL the bad overclocks while testing, every other game crash and every driver fault all together, and that game had its own issues on consoles.
IIRC PS3 auto updated Skyrim and gave lots of problems for many people on the latest patch, that isn't the first or last time a game will have bad bugs either at launch or introduced by patches, or crash. Consoles are "relatively" trouble free, but 100% trouble free, not even close. Consoles, single gpu setups, multi gpu setups with a little bit of sensible thinking, like NOT jumping on every single new driver, will provide a trouble free experience 98% of the time, if you experience the 2%, will be luck. Sometimes one game will be great on consoles, and Nvidia cards, but suck on AMD cards, sometimes a game will only be good on AMD cards, have problems on consoles and crash constantly on Nvidia cards, that's life.
If you played Rage on launch and had an Nvidia card, chances are you had problems, played on an AMD card, chances are you had problems, SLI/xfire, chances are you had problems......
Games themselves are FAR more problematic than the hardware, ALWAYS has been, ALWAYS will be.
Sadly they don't always work, and you have to figure it out by yourself. I was playing NFS : Shift, which was a six month old game, on my Crossfired 5770s. I got to the oval track and it felt really slow, so I turned on FRAPS. I was recording around 23 FPS, with drops to 4 FPS. Then I realised it wasn't working.
The fix? rename the exe to grid.exe, all solved.
But that didn't make up for the fact that I was half way through the game and up until that point it was a stuttering mess.
Well, again I'd point out, knowing how to fix AMD xfire should be something anyone using xfire should know, and its not AMD's fault that YOU chose to play half the game before fixing it, would it be AMD's fault if there was a patch available from the game manufacturer from day one that doubled FPS and you decided to not install it till half way through your game?
Anyway, to the OP, I wouldn't bother right now, prices are going to be tumbling soon, though if you're Nvidia now and only want to stay with Nvidia its not going to make "that" much difference.
IE 580gtx resale value £300, new cards £400, in a month you might struggle to get £200 for the 580gtx, but the 560ti prices should crash to £150 a piece, so £300 total, you've still got a similar price difference.
Personally I wouldn't bother, an extra card for in many situations not much more performance but this will almost entirely depend on your screen setup, sorry if I missed it. 560ti's are a pretty decent wedge faster than a 580gtx, but if you're playing skyrim and are CPU limited it won't make a difference, if you play at 1080p max settings and already get 60fps in every game you want and have a 60hz screen, I wouldn't bother. for a much higher res screen or a 3 screen setup, the increase in GPU power will likely make more difference and a 580gtx will be less adequate in a lot more situations at top settings.
It's really up to you, personally I would say, xfire is awesome, new AMD cards are out in Jan, the prices of AMD/nvidia current gen are set to go down, AMD new gen might be epic and you could well be looking at a 7970 for £225-250 that could beat 560ti sli, using half the power and with less issues in terms of noise, heat, space.
A more significant upgrade would be 2x newer 560ti's or 2x570gtx's, and price wise that might be a much nicer prospect after the AMD cards launch, that or just hang on towards mid 2012 and get something new gen from Nvidia.
and like Him I would never run Multiple cards again.
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