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5850 Vs 2x GTX 260 in SLI

I went for the 5850 and mega happy, I can max everything out and in a few months i will have another loool, plus it has dx11 so your be ready for next gen gaming :)
 
By the time your power bills have landed over the next 12 months, the price for buying and using 2x 260's will be comparable in price to a 5870.
 
Power bill for 2x 260GTX isn't too bad... prolly 50-60watt total for idle which is comparable to some single cards and as they are rarely both working 100% in SLI mode - even at load they aren't hugely higher than a comparable single card.
 
It also depend on motherboard in my case asus P6T when i went GTX 260 sli my chipset temps went up over 10 degress, southbridge is fully covered with graphic cards blocking all airflow and positioning of x16 PCI-E slots are horrible they are next to each my first card fan is blocked i got idle of 46-50 what is not so bad but after overclocking cards a bit and playing demanding gmes for hours temperature of top card is reaching 80 or more degress and sometimes got issue with nvidia driver stops responding because of overheat or artifacts starts appearing. And not all games fully supports dual card solutions. If i could go back in time i would have bought a sigle card with dual chip solution like gtx 295 or 4870x2 for better performance than single chip single card solution.
 
Would go for the 5850 seeing as you don't actually have GTX 260 sli. Once you overclock it hits 5870 levels plus it would be £40 cheaper then buying two GTX 260s and relying on sli. As drivers improves the 5850 should be at least on par anyway.
 
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If you already have a GTX260 and an SLI capable board then id get another 260 for SLI. Ive had SLI many many times and never encountered this microstutter issue people talk about. My last SLI setup was a pair of 8800GTX's, one of them a heavily overclocked EVGA model and the other a standard clocked POV model.

Now i dont have a SLI capable board anymore if i was to buy a new card it would either be a second hand 4870x2, a 5870 or a GTX295.
 
i will choose the 5850. SLi might be slightly better but try and play dx11 on dx11 games. Oh wait you cant :P Thats whats making me decide to goto ATI but theres a small side of me what still wants me to wait for nvidia.
 
gtx 260 sli will you better performance and will be more quiet than the ati vacuum cleaners. DX 11 support is a great feature but no DX11 games are out yet so I would get 2x260 and wait to see the dx 11 nvidia offerings. Its all about performance, everything else are just lame excuses.
 
Duran said:
gtx 260 sli will you better performance and will be more quiet than the ati vacuum cleaners. DX 11 support is a great feature but no DX11 games are out yet so I would get 2x260 and wait to see the dx 11 nvidia offerings. Its all about performance, everything else are just lame excuses.
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2 untrue statements in there.

1. The coolers on the 5870 and 5850 are amongst the quietest stock coolers around. Read a few more reviews and not just ones measuring furmark for noise. Certainly 2x260's will be noisier than one 5870.

2. There is already at least one DX11 game - Battleforge. DX11 games start going mainstream this year, not next. For the lifetime of his next card purchases DX11 will be important. DX11 is about performance as well (unlike DX10).

Plus, regardless of Deific 's one man crusade to make us buy 2 cards (on an economic argument that can be argued either way), one GPU is always better than 2.

- less power draw
- less heat
- no micro-stutter
- no need for profiles or driver fixes when there is an AFR incompatibility in the game.
 
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