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I need help deciding....

mrbios

mrbios

mrbios

Soldato
Joined
7 Jun 2003
Posts
16,189
Location
Gloucestershire
I've got two GTX 670s in my PC in SLI right now. One is a Gigabyte Windforce 3X the other is an EVGA FTW edition.

On my desk i also have two Asus R9 280X cards which are only a month old. (I spent a month litecoin mining, essentially got one card free out of the money i made but i've given up on it now, too much hassle)

I've got 3 x 27" monitors, all 1920x1080, 5760x1080 when i span. Which cards should i keep and which cards should i sell? I can't find any reviews with direct comparisons between 670 SLI and 280X Xfire which doesn't help.

Presumably the 280X's are worth more second hand, but are they worth the extra performance over the money i could get back for them over the 670s?
 
I would keep the 280X's if you are a gamer. The 670's have a very weak memory bus and at triple screen reolution, the 384bit bus allows the 280X to pull a fair chunk ahead and even more when overclocked.

The quandary you have is prices...The 670's are not fetching too much but then again, neither will the 280X's, as looking on the bay, sales have dropped dramatically since the price crash.

If it was me though, I would hold onto the 280X's and take the hit in the MM for the 670's. They are both great brands and the EVGA carries the warranty over with the new owner, so that should help keep that price up a little.
 
Thanks Gregster, that's some useful info. I think it's enough to persuade me :)

It'll also be nice to go back to two cards that look the same! I keep getting annoyed by having to different branded graphics cards in my system :p
 
mrbios said:
Thanks Gregster, that's some useful info. I think it's enough to persuade me :)

It'll also be nice to go back to two cards that look the same! I keep getting annoyed by having to different branded graphics cards in my system :p
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Good choice. I know what you mean about different GPU's in the same build. I had a 680 Lightning and a ref EVGA 680 and I am not one for aesthetics in truth but it bugged the hell out of me having to look at that unsightly mess, so I bought another Lightning and went full custom water cooling :D
 
As Greg said, keep the 280's

Had exactly the same as you OP - WF + FTW :D

Personally, quite fond of mixing my cards.... or at least, that's what I'm telling myself!

Though, I do actually like both cards. And they run at exactly the same clocks at boost on memory and core under boost.

Anyway, 280 for your setup!
 
Just put the two 280X's in, I think i'll stick with this, except i think i need to RMA one of them because one of the fans sounds like it has an issue (sounds like it's rubbing against something) which is disapointing but at least i can live with one for the time being :)

EDIT: I'm not sure if it's all in my head, but sat on the desktop, on ocuk forums, and looking at steam....colours look a bit clearer. Is it a common thing for AMD gpus to be a bit sharper on the colours? There's definitely a difference that's for sure.
EDIT2: hmmm the fan noise has stopped now, guess i'll give it a day and see what it does.
 
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I felt it was the other way round. When I broke my Titan, I put a 6970 into as a temp card and the text didn't look so good to me and a little fuzzy. Temps shot up as well with 2 monitors, and just sitting on desktop had the card running hot, where with Nvidia, it idles the same temp, no matter how many monitors are connected.
 
First time using Crossfire, only ever used SLI before. Any information anyone can give me that could be valuable? It's enabled in the CCC, should i tick the box to enable it even for programs that dont have an application profile? Do i need to download anything for these application profiles?

EDIT: also with nvidia and 3 monitors i found i could have the same task bar duplicated on every monitor which i found useful. The only two options i can see for AMD is to have either 1. a single task bar on one monitor or 2. one taskbar spread across all 3 monitors. Is there any way of getting the same duplicated taskbar on each monitor with AMD?
 
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I felt that even at 1920x1200 that my 670's in sli would soon start to struggle. x2 wf models. Sold both on members market. Got a good enough price for the first one but it was a monster clocker. Bit less for the other, it was by no means a slouch either tbh.
 
setter said:
I felt that even at 1920x1200 that my 670's in sli would soon start to struggle. x2 wf models. Sold both on members market. Got a good enough price for the first one but it was a monster clocker. Bit less for the other, it was by no means a slouch either tbh.
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Skyrim with the high res packs and lots of graphical mods would really struggle with a single 670 at 5760x1080 (understandably) but with two 670s it did a good job. Granted i've no idea what my FPS was, i never actually checked, but it ran nice and smooth.
 
I was mainly playing bf3 and 4, the former was grand on maximum settings. The latter ran ok but vram use was getting close to 2gb, average fps of 90 on ultra with x4 msaa. Ive taken a bit of a hit on max fps by switching to a single gtx 780, but min/average are pretty much the same and the extra ram gives me some breathing space.
 
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