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SLI vs crossfire

I'm not really talking benchmarking and performance.
More for reliability than anything.

I currently have crossfire 5850s, was intending to do trifire but my sapphire one is dying.
And I find quite a bit of un-reliability in some games, e.g. micro stutter etc
 
Hard really to rate either based on reliability, SLI still tends to be a little more robust and slightly better supported, from my experience the framerates with SLI are a bit more consistant too.
 
According to my overall experience, nVidia is doing slightly better at drivers and SLI, than ATI is doing at drivers and CF. Though I was disappointed that SLI in 3DMark11 was not supported until almost one week after I received my 580s. One should not touch multi-GPU if he/she is not prepared to be tortured by drivers.
 
Crossfire scaling is a lot more impressive with the 6xxx series, not to mention that a lot more motherboards support crossfire over SLI. However AMD's driver support is a *tad* sketchy :)
 
unless your loaded forget them both. just buy the best card you can its way less hastle.

but sli is the better.

ati= driver issues
2x ati = even more driver issues

nvidia not a problem from the geforce 2 cards that ive had.

not just flaming ati ive had there card to

main problem with sli new games dont support it but when they bring out new drivers it does get fixed
 
Up until the 6 series crossfire was a good few percentage points slower than sli, and wasn't supported as well as sli (game profiles). The new 6 series crossfire is much improved, providing similar and sometimes better scaling than sli, but they haven't changed their approach to the drivers. I've never had any problems with ATI drivers personally, so I can't really comment there
 
Theres more to good multi GPU performance than average fps scaling, low level framerate consistancy/microstutter, overall framerate consistancy, % of time at minimum fps, etc. all can make or break it regardless of the min/max/avg numbers.
 
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i am literally hovering over the buy button for 6950 [70] CF, i already have one,

the only games where i personally need more FPS are metro, and crysis [and crysis 2 when it comes out] metro CF 6970 is superior to SLI 580 at high resolutions [according to anandtech] and for about 40% less cost
 
This is my first ever system build with two GPU's so I do not know if the 6000 series is just plain better than the 5000 series with crossfire but I do not get any micro stutter or any of the other things people say. As far as performance it feels great having high/smooth fps and high quality graphics at the same time :)
As far as I remember reviews put it near 580 SLI performance but obviously a lot cheaper and tests where done on 10.11 or 10.12 drivers and support for the 6000 series and CF has moved on a bit since then.

As with any SLI or CF setup its going to work best if the rest of your system is up to the job as well.
 
Firstly ewarwoowar, I would buy the most strongest SINGLE graphics card you can afford.

Regarding sli/xfire, I would say they are about the same although Nvidia is rumored to have better driver support

if you insist on xfire: go with your preference... or if you don't have a preference, pick the cards that suit your budget
 
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