SLI or Crossfire

[dousland70]

Hi all

Im thinking about running two graphics cards, but cant decide whether to go for 2 x 3870x2 in crossfire ( when drivers are available ) or wait and run 2 x 9800GTX in sli ? Im looking to play top games
like crysis at 1920 x 1200

My spec currently :

Q6600
Asus P5K-E
4GB Geil 6400 ram
WD Caviar 500gb WD5000AAKS
OCZ StealthXStream 600w Silent SLI Ready ATX2 Power Supply
BFG GeForce 8800 GTX OC 768MB GDDR3
Vista Ultimate 32bit
Samsung SM-245B 24" Widescreen 1920 x 1200

I know i will have to upgrade psu and motherboard in any case as i believe my
mobo's 2nd PCIE GPU slot is only x8 in crossfire

Would love to hear peoples pro's and cons for each

 

[Peter450]

I'm currently embarking on my first self build and have been looking at a lot of the options too, having more or less sorted the case now...thanks to some helpful advice on this forum, I was gonna go with a 8800gtx, then yo an behold a 3870x2 appears to further complicate things, and with some futher digging around i have found that, the 9800 series supposedly?? is due to lanuch sometime this month or next according to various forums.

Myself personally, (i'm getting a singe card not twin ones, but the same logic i guess is gonna apply as if 1 card is 50% quicker than another i guess the SLI/CF versions when compared will be similar) I myself am going to wait for the 9800 series as these should be a significant jump in performance over current gen cards.

The benchmarks i have seen for the 3870x2 in games like crysis put in on a par or within a few frames of the 8800 GTX or in some cases the ultra depending on the game

However the kind of framerates current cards seem to get in cysis with graphics turned up to max seem low, they benched it on a 3 way sli 8800 ultra card system here and at 1680x1050 with all the details and flashy bits turned up the game is barely playable, although by turning down the quality settings it actually ran faster at the higher of the two resolutions.

Personally i would wait an see what the performance of the 9800 series is like, i would expect that twin 9800 series cards will likely run crysis better than any current gen card at most resolutions.

I guess it comes down to your expectations if you just want cysis to run well and look great and are willing to compromise on some of the higher quality settings then you will be able to get a decent framerate with very nice graphics on twin 3870s, but if you want/expect more i would wait see how the 9800 compares before spending your cash

The article i refer to above is here http://www.hothardware.com/articles/NVIDIA_3Way_SLI_Performance_Preview/?page=1

 

[mike gunnz]

That article was about 3 way SLI.

What 9800 new-gen card are you referring to?

AFAIK there are rumours of an impending 9800GX2 in the next month or two but this is almost definitely not next-gen tech.

 

[LoadsaMoney]

The 9 series are due to appear at CeBit, so will be launched after that probably, but as above, they ain't new, their still old 2006 8800's, the proper next gen is now supposedly the GT200's, which will no doubt appear arround the time of AMD's next gen, the R700, thats supposedly middle of the year, bit later.

 

[Peter450]

ah ok, was getting confused a bit there i thought the 9800 was the next series, due to the 9 prefix, thanks for clearing it up, do you have any more details of what this card is going to have?

The reason i linked the 3 sli article is as the guy wants to play games like cysis at very high res it's a good indicator of what your going to need to play high res, high details as it also has dual sli benchmarks in there too

 

[dousland70]

Thanks for posting guys , its all very helpful

 

[dousland70]

Hmmm maybe i should wait till later this year for the next gen , if i start thinking with my head it proberbly dosent make a lot of sense to pay more for a card that im not gonna see much improvement on graphics

 

[ArcAneTSGK]

If i was going to choose Crossfire or SLI, i'd choose crossfire. Cheaper, and it scales better. Nvidia SLI 2x configuration is like scales to like 1.6/1.7 (depending on what card) where a Crossfire 2x Setup will scale better at around 1.9-2 depending on which card.

 

[Jakus]

Crossfire, Lots of good cheap HD3800 cards to choose from and with top "single Cards" being Crossfire a great time ahead for up to date crossfire optimised drivers.