Your Opinion on upgrading from 270x's

Hey everyone, I have been debating about selling my two 270x's and buying a GTX 780. My cards are 2gb non-reference Sapphire models. I have been questionably satisfied with their performance and am worrying about the upcoming year. I wanted to hold out until the GTX 800 series is released, but that is going to be awhile it seams. Plans are in the making for buying two more monitors for 5760x1080 gaming. What do you all think?

FX-8350
Asus 990FX Pro 2.0
32GB GSkill 1600
256GB SSd
Corsair 850 Watt
R9 270x (x2)

I looked around a little and while I couldn't find a direct side by side comparison, it looks like if a game scales well with crossfire, the 270xs would be better, but if the game doesn't, the 780 is better. The main question is when are you planning on getting the two monitors and of course when the 800 series comes out (I can't find anything besides "2014").

For 5760x1080 gaming, the 2GB of ram the two cards have will be a definite bottleneck. But, if you get a 780 and then NVidia announces the new line is coming sometime in the near future (like May/June) it just seems like a waste.

So my suggestion would be hang on to the 270xs for now if they're working for you, unless you really want that triple monitor setup.

You ran into the same research annoyance as me; No side by side comparison. I agree that the benchmarks imply identical performance.

From the articles and forums I have poked through, there seems to be good reason of why the 800 series will not be out for quit awhile. They are releasing another Titan version, GTX 790 is coming, Nvidia is still selling tons of the 700 series, and the architecture for the new chips has experienced setbacks.

The triple monitor is not something I have to have now, I just think I would enjoy it a lot. I did a Eyefinity setup with three screens at 1600x1050 with BF4 and the GPU's could not push it on ultra settings, but lowering AA did the trick and still looked great. I currently have three monitors, one native 1920x1080 (new monitor) and the other two are native 1600x1050.

Titanfall has caught my attention and I think having surround on that would be awesome. I am curious if only one 780 would run BF4 and Titanfall on max across three screens. Does the extra 1GB of RAM and the 384-bit bus make that large of a difference?

There is also the possibility that I just have an itch for a hardware change...

With 3 screens, yes extra gb of ram and wider bus width will help with the larger resolution. You MIGHT get more frames with the 270xs but they may introduce micro stutter and other issues that come with crossfire. An overclocked 780 is a force to be reckoned with. I do know the 780 will run much cooler..and use much less power...If benchmarks seem close I would go ahead and go for the single 780...stability, cooler, better for high res gaming (extra bus width and memory)

Waiting for new gpus is another option ..but 800 series could cost more

Good points. Heat and power don't really worry me though. The memory and bus have my interest.

Bringing up the 800's cost, I would suspect the top end card would be $500-600 range upon release (except the Ti or equivalent specials).

I was also thinking that switching to a 780 now and getting a second later on for SLI may be enough to skip the 800 series all together. Where as, staying with the 270s would leave me wishing for more, possibly as early as late 2014 game titles are released...?

Getting a second 780 is a definite possibility. Getting one now and then maybe a second one when you get the extra two monitors or when the 800 series hits and the price drops on the 700 series. This will also allow you to get a better price for the 270xs while they're still current gen and there's still some heat left in the cryptocoin market.

780 will be more "future proof" because is has a bigger bus and extra ram. Will probably handle multiple monitors better than 270xs. 2 780s in sli will demolish 270x crossfire.

You might have the power for future games with 270xs but you will experience lag spikes and frame hitching due to bus and ram especially with multiple monitors

Well, the 290s dropped in price a little bit today and Newegg had the Sapphire Tri-X edition for $499. I ordered 2 of them. A bit more than planned but I figure it is a good deal and just a slump in price due to cryptocurrenty being flaky recently. Will prolly go back up in a week or two....?

Due to the decent price, 4gb memory & 512-bit bus, and Mantle still seeming like a positive addition to game development, I feel that I made a good choice.

Agree?

I agree this will be a good setup for multiple monitors. I once crossfired my old 7970 with my woman's 280x and had extremely high frame rates. But I did have some issues with crossfire. In tomb raider I was getting over 120fps but if I tabbed out of the game and back in I would have terrible stutter but still same framerate. The framerate seemed to fluctuate much more than with one card..However amd is constantly improving their drivers so I'd say you'll be good for a while with 2 r9 290s. Also mantle could be a bug game changer..However I see Microsoft and directx12 are gonna try to spoil that... gotta love competition!

I'm sick of crossfire/sli... had multiple setups since way back in the day and the drivers take too long to catch up and frequently newer games take several months to even work properly..

i say stay away.

That is true, but I am still in the phase of enjoying tinkering with it and I have not had any terrible trouble with the setups yet. Just a few minor glitches for temporary annoyance. Lol. I don't play a wide variety of games though. Usually am hooked on one or two at a time for a year or two.