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SLI / Xfire vs 1 Uber card?

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Spyral

Registered
Joined
Jun 4, 2008
I'm thinking of building a new PC (crackbook is good but no games .... :bang head) and I'd be on a bit of a budget. To be honest I mostly will be playing oldies but I do like a bit of oblivion and guild wars from time to time. Basically I'm wondering is it worth getting a £2X card, or 2 x £X cards or what? eg 1 £100 card or 2x £50 in sli/crossfire/whatever. I've not been keeping up to date with computer stuff for a while but since my pc up and died on my last visit home I'm missing it *sniff*
 
Im not a big fan of Crossfire or SLI. I would say, unless you are rocking a 2560x1600 res (30" monitor) that one card will play everything you listed and more. What resolution do you game at and how much would you spend on one card (in USD please so I can have an idea of what to get).
 
Probably about £100 which is about $165 BUT prices are more expensive over here... cheaper would be good though. I think the most taxing game I own is NWN2 but I'd like to be able to run it on max along with more modern games on decent settings.
 
It depends on what cards you are going to crossfire and what games you will play.
Ill take the simplicity of a good single card anyday.
 
How is it that 1 good graphics card is better than 2 weaker ones whereas nowadays a dual cpu with lower clock speed is better than a single core with a higher speed? Its it the same ?
 
Slower cards usually have less memory or a lower memory bit width which can severly bottleneck mulitple cards, as memory doesn't add up. And the fact that unlike cpu processes which can scale 200% from 1 to 2 cores, Sli/CF varies from 0% - ~180% depending on game and drivers.

I think you are looking at a HD5770 or 5750 for your budget. If you like Oblivion, these should allow high settings and also offer DX11, which will make future games like Oblivion look better!
HD5770:
http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/...ics-ATI/ATIHD5700Series/Novatech/57701GB.html
 
I agree that one good $165 card is usually better than 2 much weaker $85 cards.

I love NWN2 and I can max it out with my 8800GTX which was released in 2006. So, you shouldn't have a problem maxing out that game with the some of the newer cards available.
 
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