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Graphics card upgrade advice. Gtx 560 SLI?

Sabre66

Sabre66

Sabre66

Associate
Joined
15 Jan 2010
Posts
20
Location
Clare, Ireland
Hello everyone,

I'm starting to feel its about time for an upgrade as my current gaphics card (gtx260) is starting to show its age. I was thinking of maybe getting 2 GTX 560's most likely 2Gb cards. But I was wondering whether these 2 cards would be good for my current system.
At the moment I have.
:Intel Q9650 @3.00ghz
:ASrock N7ad-sli motherboard
:8Gb of ddr2 ram 800mhz
:850W power supply

Would I be getting much of a bottleneck with that cpu and 2 GTX 560's? I was thinking of getting 2 of these cards since their roughly the same price as a GTX 570 and on all the benchmarks iv seen their more poewerful than a single GTX 580.
I play at 1920x1080 by the way and the reason I was thinking 2 GB cards is that I like to play games like STALKER and The Elder Scrolls with high texture graphics mods which in my experience use a lot of vram and my gtx 260 really struggles with its 800 and something MB

Thanks :)
 
Last edited:
siege2 said:
That would cost you 420 for both off them, get a 7970 that will do you for 2 more years at least for for around the same price and less noise. Etc.
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Well iv found 2 GTX 560 2GB cards for £320. My budget is really no more than 400 euro so around £330. But I'll definitely take that into account becasue the 7970 is some card! But at the moment it is quite a bit above my budget.
 
So would anyone be able to help me answer my original question, Would 2 Gtx 560's be a good addition or would the rest of the system hold back the performance increase drastically? If it would a lot, could someone suggest another card under £330 that would be better?
 
Sabre66 said:
So would anyone be able to help me answer my original question, Would 2 Gtx 560's be a good addition or would the rest of the system hold back the performance increase drastically? If it would a lot, could someone suggest another card under £330 that would be better?
Click to expand...

I'd check the specs on this cards, at that price they sound like GTX560 cards, not GTX560TI cards. There is a significant performance difference.

SLI 560 = (approx) GTX580

SLI 560TI > GTX580

SLI also takes some CPU poke.

With BF3 I found A Q6600 @ 3.6Ghz a bottleneck with one card.... though technically at full Ultra it wasn't though the frame rate wasn't quite smooth enough.

At Ultra settings a stock I5 2500k was about the same fps but smooth enough to play. At high it is nearly 50% faster and medium nearly 100% faster....

With a pair of GTX560TI's in SLI I BF3 fps improved quite linearly with an average around 50fps @ 3.3Ghz + turbo and ~75fps at 4.5Ghz.

In short... a s775 Quad is a bottleneck for SLI 560's.

If the budget is tight, hold on a few weeks more and get a 7950 on release. Should overclock nicely and be similar performance to 7970 once clocked or just get a 580 ...

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decto said:
I'd check the specs on this cards, at that price they sound like GTX560 cards, not GTX560TI cards. There is a significant performance difference.
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Click to expand...

Sorry should have been more specific, The card I was looking at is a GTX 560 2GB from Plait not the TI version.

What does a bottleneck look like then, will I just not be able to get the full potential out of the cards or will it actually slow down and cause the system to stutter?

Would the 7950 and the Q9650 not bottleneck as well though? I would have thought a single 7950 would be more powerful than 2 Gtx 560's

-Daniel
 
To be honest some people have probs with sli and your budget of £330 is very good but like me I can't quite afford a 7970 till February 28th (pay day) so I am hoping between this time the price will fall so I can get one earlier.
I am not telling you what you should do but this is what I shall be doing and thought I would pass my thoughts on :)
 
Sabre66 said:
Sorry should have been more specific, The card I was looking at is a GTX 560 2GB from Plait not the TI version.

What does a bottleneck look like then, will I just not be able to get the full potential out of the cards or will it actually slow down and cause the system to stutter?

Would the 7950 and the Q9650 not bottleneck as well though? I would have thought a single 7950 would be more powerful than 2 Gtx 560's

-Daniel
Click to expand...

Basically a bottleneck is where you don't get the performance you expect. All systems have a bottleneck somewhere ... a rate limiting step. The trick is to get a balance so no one area is significantly over specified.

The effect you get is that adding a second card may not make the system any faster or it may be 10, 20 30 % faster, not the 80-90% SLI should bring.

A single card will be less of an issue as SLI takes more CPU power to run than standard. Also a single card doesn't have the SLI compatibility issues that can arise.

The only reason to over specify on GPU would be if you plan on upgrading the rest of the system in a reasonable time frame.

SLI 560 at it's best is around the same performance as a GTX580 and at it's worst in a game that doesn't support SLI will be around 60% performance or slower so it makes no sense to go with SLI with the small difference in price.
The GTX580 or a 7850 will perform near peak fairly consistently in any given circumstance.

Though if you plan on keeping your system for a while without upgrading a 6950 / 6970 / GTX560TI / GTX570 may be more balance option.

A gtx570 is cheaper still and will OC to GTX580 / GTX560SLI performance with little effort. Unless you are running high res then this may be a cheap option

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decto said:
Basically a bottleneck is where you don't get the performance you expect. All systems have a bottleneck somewhere ... a rate limiting step. The trick is to get a balance so no one area is significantly over specified.

The effect you get is that adding a second card may not make the system any faster or it may be 10, 20 30 % faster, not the 80-90% SLI should bring.

A single card will be less of an issue as SLI takes more CPU power to run than standard. Also a single card doesn't have the SLI compatibility issues that can arise.
Click to expand...

Ok thanks didnt know that :)
At the moment the Gtx 580 is a little more than I wanted to spend, If i was going to go the single card route I would prefer to spend under £300 but still be able to use it for 2 to 3 years. Like the Gtx 260 came out in mid 2008 and It still plays most of the games I have at max although the frames do go quite low sometimes. Iv actually become use to frame rates going bellow 20. I play at 1920x1080 by the way.

Any idea how much the HD 7950 will be when it comes out?
 
Ok cool I'll wait for that card to come out to decide but I'll probably take your advice and go for a single card then. Is there any pre release review's out for it like there were for the HD 7970?

O and by the way I'm overclocking My Q9650 at the moment and its at 3.6ghz stabe under Prime95 for 7 and half hours so far. Hopefully that should add a bit more performance and help a small bit with any bottlenecks.
 
I have 560ti in sli not 2g cards and they are great. But personally I would eihter wait till a little drop in price of the 7970, or the 7950 comes out i you patient enough wait for the nvidia's to hit he selves soon. Which I will be buy hopefully either 670 or 680 depending on price
 
Well iv been wanting to upgrade for over a year now but if needs be I can wait. Iv heard the new Kepler core is gonna be amazing but that will probably also mean expensive.
In a way there's always a bad thing about waiting for the next release of technology and not buying whats out now, because you may just end up waiting for ever as there's always gonna be something better coming out in a couple of months and thats why I want to upgrade soon.
 
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