• Competitor rules

    Please remember that any mention of competitors, hinting at competitors or offering to provide details of competitors will result in an account suspension. The full rules can be found under the 'Terms and Rules' link in the bottom right corner of your screen. Just don't mention competitors in any way, shape or form and you'll be OK.

SLI or single card setup

josh3190

josh3190

josh3190

Associate
Joined
15 Aug 2011
Posts
171
Location
Southampton
Hi everyone, I'm currently in the process of trying to spec a new pc mostly for gaming purposes and I haven't kept up to date with all the latest and greatest.

My main question is whether or not it's going to be better for my gaming needs to sli 2 nvidia 560 ti's together or go for a single card.

Not going to be multi screen gaming but looking to get a decent set up so I'm not going to have to gut it out anytime soon. The types of games I'm going to be playing on it are Rage, Battlefield 3 and Skyrim in the near future.

Any help would be greatly appreciated, been so long since I've dabbled in this sort of stuff!
 
I'd say a 570 or even 580 would be a better choice than 2x560ti. Less power, less heat and noise. No reliance on good SLI support.
 
So you think some thing like a 1.5Gb 580 is gonna perform just as good as 2x560ti's? is the support for sli really that bad?
 
Some really great prices at the moment from OCuk on Nvidia cards, although they are refurbs, but still great value.

IMO best bang for buck nvidia card would be the GTX570. A factory O/C version would be a great buy, SLI could come at a later date by adding another 570.
 
I can't discuss the choices of cards but I recently asked myself the same question and decided to opt for SLi of GTX460 (5 series weren't out then!)
I thought that for noise issues 2 GPUs would run cooler and therefore qieter than a mega beast of a GPU.

My impression now is that I am bloody disappointed with the SLias it feels that although it runs ok I get double the noise!

ANy other opinions out there?
 
so performance wise am I really going to get that much of an improvement if at all using 2 560 ti's instead of one 570?
 
2x560ti's it is then! also Operation I see you're running an i5 2500k overclocked to 4.4Ghz, was thinking about getting the same processor, will it be good enough for 2 560 ti's or do you think it would be worth upping it to a quad core i7 processor?
 
An overclocked 2500K will have more than enough grunt for an SLI setup like that.
Perosnally I would go for a single card setup then add another down the line later, no experience of SLI myself but never really had any problems with Xfire.
 
Yes, the i5 is a good balance for the price. If you're looking at gaming and not media work it will handle anything you throw at it with ease and should or some time to come. Clocking it is ridiculously easy.

If you're going down the 560ti SLI route, do sone digging and pick ones with the best cooler to balance heat and noise. It will e a very powerful set up.

Worth thinking about VRAm though. If your resolution is 1920 or upwards you might suffer from a lack of it in a small number of games (maybe more in the future). Two cards does not equal twice the VRAM, there will still only be 1GB useable.
 
I had an 8800gtx sli setup and had so much hassle with it - some games ran better with the SLI disabled, believe it or not. Having to tweak the settings for almost every game got old really quick, and I can't see myself ever going back to SLI over a single card in the future.
 
So perhaps investing in a 1.3Gb gtx570 is a good solution for now and then pending on how it performs with games maybe adding another 570 down the line to help max out games that are going to be coming out in the future??

Or would it be worth stumping up the extra cash in the short term for a 1.5Gb 580 although buying another one of those wouldn't happen for a while down to the price...
 
the only problem is if I then want to go for an SLI setup down the road I have to fork out for the same graphics card which could be a while
 
Also be aware of stuttering and flickering issues when using SLi/Crossfire as it has still not been completely resolved. Although this only affects a very small percentage of people.
 
Yeah i've heard about some people talking about microstuttering Jay85, just been looking at your build, see you used to have crossfire amd's but have now switched to a 570gtx right? how are you getting on with that in respect to your old crossfire setup?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom