5870 CF vs GTX480 SLI?

[GMdoubleG]

Hello all, first off, I have to say that I know very little about both Crossfire and SLI and I am building a Very High-End computer for a friend (budget $2500). I have read pages and pages of reviews of both cards and I see the ups and downs on both. However, there are still some questions I have.

First, there are a lot of reviews that say ATI CF has been having issues with micro-stuttering. What is this? Is this something that doesn't have a solution yet and will it ever have a solution?

Second, reviews say that SLI scales very well with the new GTX480s. Does scaling well just mean that they work very well together? If I run two GTX480s and a mild over-clock on the i7, will my PSU need to be around 1200W? Reviews say the 480s take somewhere near 500W.

Third, when choosing the right Motherboard, does it need to specifically say that it supports CF or SLI? Or is it just marketing that companies put SLI or CF on the box to show that it has two or more PCI-E ports? Also, when setting up SLI or CF, is it just as simple as installing the cards and putting the connection wire on them?

I haven't been able to find a review that actually pins CF vs SLI with the new cards. I can understand this since there aren't too many people out there using SLI with power hungry GTX480s (at least to my knowledge).

Any help, onsight, knowledge, etc. would be very appreciated!

Also, specs of PC:
CPU: Intel Core i7 920
MoBo: ASUS or EVGA SLI/CF ready
RAM: OCZ gold ddr3 1600
PSU: Corsair TX950W (maybe higher if I SLI gtx480s?)
other goodies

Thanks for the help.

[mattspalace]

1. I ran dual 5870's for some time and never experienced microstuttering. Probably a very small group who experience this.

2. SLI and Crossfire are both scaling better now than ever before. Performance is still usually not double the performance of a single card, but is often at least 50% and usually about 70% or so - occasionally 90-100 percent, but not the norm.

3. With dual 5870's, I suggest a minimum of 850W. And this is a good power supply, not some $50 1000W job that weighs three pounds. Dual GTX 480's would probably call for a 1200W PSU.. They do draw a lot of power.

All current high-end X58 chipset-based boards, which is what you want, will support either SLI for Crossfire.

Yup, plug the cards in, apply the bridge, reboot, install drivers, ensure SLI or Crossfire is enabled, and go from there..

I personally wouldn't buy OCZ memory, but that's just me..

Don't skimp on the cooler. Prolimatech Megahalems is a nice unit to pair with some good 120mm fans.

[don'tknow]

GTX480 SLI will give you better performance in every game, maybe except a select few where it'll be about equal to 2x 5870's.

The problem is the heat. It highly depends on where your friend who will be using the PC lives and if they're willing to use water cooling. If they live in a cold region (way up north or something), I assume you can get away without water cooling. Otherwise, it's unsure currently how stable 2x GTX480 in SLI will be in the long-term, if you live in a 'normal' or warm climate. They will regularly heat up within 10C of throttle limit which means more chance for stability issues or clock speeds throttling down when stressing the gpus with games/etc.

So far there hasn't been enough feedback and testing with multiple GTX480 configurations so it's hard to say what will really happen in the long term. Maybe they will turn out to be perfectly stable for many years regardless of ambient temps and cooling; but I'm really doubting it, until I see it happen.

[wingman99]

Get the GTX480 sli, I trust nvidia engineers they have not failed in the past with there high-performance line and it beats the 5870 CF

However I like to see if they are going to sell the hole world bad GTX480's I can only imagine how many people around the world are going to using these cards retail and OEM cases, the list goes on.

The heat blows out the back of the PC case anyway no need for liquid cooling because OEM wont do it, they have to run on air, in the hottest climates around the world, if GTX480 does fail it will make the news, it will be one of the biggest failures i've ever seen out of the big 3 intel, ATI, nvidia.

ATI had there worst disaster with the ATI rage fury maxx however it still ran on some pc's however it would crash on 3D applications, it was the first dual core video card. That fiasco would not even come close to what people are speculating about with the GTX480

I say heat won't kill the silicon chip, however I've been around pc before they used temp sensors and they used heat sinks to keep them under 100c no fans except the psu.

[PhysX]

for dual gtx you can use a 750W psu and still have head room. and the gtx 480 is fine upto 105C, after that it will throttle down, personalyl I havent seen mine go over 90C, thats being ocd at 775, 1500, 2010

[Andrew149]

well 2 gtx480 are close to a single 5970 which is pretty close