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SLI, Crossfire, or a single GPU. Please help.

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  • Graphics
Last response: in Graphics & Displays
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July 14, 2013 9:45:21 PM

I 'm going to buy a graphics card or 2 in a few months and I'm not sure what to get. I have an ASUS M5A99FX PRO R2.0, an OCZ ZX 1000w psu, and a FX-6300 overclocked to 4.8ghz. I'll be playing games like Battlefield 4, Metro Last Light, and The Witcher 3 when it comes out. Anything over $400 for 1 card is more than I care to pay and if it's over $300 I'll wait till The Witcher 3 is out to get a second card if I need one. Also I'll be using a 1080p LED TV. Thanks.

More about : sli crossfire single gpu

July 14, 2013 10:02:38 PM

u_gonna_squeal_b4_we_cookya said:
As an SLI owner, get a single beast of a card. Trust me. Unless you like having driver issues and random in game crashes once every few hours, just get one card. For $400, a GTX 770 will be able to play all of those games in very high to ultra in 1080p. Hell, you could probably play tose games in those detail levels above 1080p with decent frame rates.


What cards and driver are you running? I'm running TRI and i have none of those issues
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July 14, 2013 10:04:51 PM

Single card all the way if possible.
SLI is okay but of course a single card is less hassle less heat and in general better.
Crossfire is broken right now with significant microstuttering / poor scaling in some games.
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July 14, 2013 10:12:27 PM

Intel God said:
u_gonna_squeal_b4_we_cookya said:
As an SLI owner, get a single beast of a card. Trust me. Unless you like having driver issues and random in game crashes once every few hours, just get one card. For $400, a GTX 770 will be able to play all of those games in very high to ultra in 1080p. Hell, you could probably play tose games in those detail levels above 1080p with decent frame rates.


What cards and driver are you running? I'm running TRI and i have none of those issues


I haven't experienced this either.

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July 14, 2013 10:21:10 PM

Two moderate cards in SLI will just about always top a single high end card. For example, two 650 Ti Boosts for $310 outperform both the 680 ($400) and and 7970 Ghz ($450) ..... Techpowerup didn't seem to have any of these driver problems and in-game crashes and neither have I.

http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/NVIDIA/GeForce_GTX_6...
Quote:

After running the GeForce GTX 650 Ti Boost SLI through our test suite, I have to admit that I'm impressed. The duo delivered performance easily matching and often exceeding much more expensive single-card options such as the GeForce GTX 680 and Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition, and they don't cost as much. SLI multi-GPU scaling works well with all of our titles except for F1 2012. Scaling by going from one to two GTX 650 Ti Boost cards is around 70%, even with F1 2012 taken into account. Unlike AMD, NVIDIA does a good job of maintaining its SLI profiles, so you should be able to play new games without a long wait for multi-GPU support. However, the risk that a game will not be supported still exists, and you might, at worst, end up with single-card performance. This is in my opinion, given the massive performance-per-dollar advantage, an acceptable tradeoff. I would definitely recommend a GTX 650 Ti Boost SLI setup to a friend looking to spend as little money as possible on a high-end gaming rig.

With a combined price of [$310], the graphics cards cost much less than the HD 7970 GHz Edition ($430) and the GTX 680 ($440) while still delivering comparable performance. Power draw and noise levels are slightly higher, but that's the price you'll have to pay to save over 100 bucks. This setup also makes upgrading your aging rig to play the latest and most demanding titles without breaking the bank an option..... Have [$310] and want high-end performance? Consider this!



Yes, when a new game comes out, ya likely gotta wait a week or 3 until a profile gets written and tweaked, but other than that, my experiences have been smooth. The twin GTX 560 Tis ($410) on Son No. 3's box smoke the single $500 GTX580 on Son No. 2's box by over 40%. Does the SLI box crash with driver issues ? ..... certainly ..... but no more often than my lappie (670MX) or the 580.

The instances where I have seen issues with SLI have been with overlcocked GPUs and cheap PSUs (read as nothing that doesn't get a 9.5 or better rating on jonnyguru). For whatever reason, a system that needs a 450 watter will often be fed by a 650 watter in single GPU build and yet when they go SLI/CF, the wattage is oft close to the bare minimum.

The ATX spec allows 5% voltage variation from the CPU and if that's what you're seeing, then I expect that one will experience crashed. As the game demands rise and fall, the PSU scrambles to supply proper and stable voltages. The VRM on the cards tries to manage this wildly varying feed and struggles doing so. With anything more than moderate overclocks, I look for 1% voltage variation or less ..... typically a 10.0 performance rated PSU on jonnyguru (Corsair AX series, HX series ... except for 1000 and 1050 watters, Seasonic X series, Antec Signature or CP series. Those with 9.5 ratings (XFX Core Editions, Corsair TX V2 series, Antec HCG / HCP series will do 2-3% and handle a bit more moderate OC's. Corsair CX series, Antec Neo, Basiq, etc., Thermaltake, Coolermaster, OCZ etc are going to have much more difficulty handling the more variable loads from SLI and will therefore be a bit more problematic. NOTE: I have also seen power conditioning on the house line eliminate or at least reduce such problems..... the more stable the feed to the PSU, the less it struggles and therefore the less everything down the line struggles.

That being said, a lot depends on budget as to whether ya go SLI from the getgo or get one now and one later. With $300 to spend, I think Id get the twin MSI 650 Ti Boosts (2GB) @ $155 each for a total of $310. At $400-ish,\Id get the Gibabyte Windforce GTX 770 and a PSU that could support a 2nd further on down the line.

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July 14, 2013 10:21:31 PM

u_gonna_squeal_b4_we_cookya said:
Intel God said:
u_gonna_squeal_b4_we_cookya said:
As an SLI owner, get a single beast of a card. Trust me. Unless you like having driver issues and random in game crashes once every few hours, just get one card. For $400, a GTX 770 will be able to play all of those games in very high to ultra in 1080p. Hell, you could probably play tose games in those detail levels above 1080p with decent frame rates.


What cards and driver are you running? I'm running TRI and i have none of those issues


Asus GTX 660 DC20-2G5 + 550w OCZ ZT 550w 80 plus Bronze (min. of 490w required for these cards in SLI) and running latest stable drivers 320.49. The cards never go over 70c and my CPU never goes over 70c either. I'm pretty sure it is a driver issue because when the game crashes (happens in almost all games with demanding graphics such as Borderlands 2, Far Cry 3 and GTA IV in highest settings) a little window with "Nvidia driver error" pops up. Other owners of GTX 6xx series cards in SLI also report the same problem and many of them have huge PSU's with 750w to well over 1,000w. Also, everyone has zero errors in single card mode.


As soon as i saw OCZ i kinda have a feeling its a PSU issue. Have you tried a different PSU?
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July 14, 2013 10:32:43 PM

Get a single GTX 770 for a 1080p display it would be just fine. I have a SLI GTX 670 setup and while it is great and I have not had even one crash in game or driver in fact my whole i5 3570K rig has been rock steady since I built it in January.

The thing is even a GTX 670 can handle gaming at 1080p on a single card. The real power of my SLI setup comes in when I game at 5760x1080 on the games that support it. But 1080p games far out way games that support Eyefinity/Surround.

Unlike u_gonna_squeal_b4_we_cookya problem with SLI I have found it to be extremely stable and have been running it for about 7 months with out problem. There is something else going on to get crashes like that every hour or so that is completely unrelated to his SLI setup. So do not worry about that it is not common at all.
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July 15, 2013 12:14:35 AM

single GPU
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July 15, 2013 1:11:37 AM

u_gonna_squeal_b4_we_cookya said:
Intel God said:
u_gonna_squeal_b4_we_cookya said:
As an SLI owner, get a single beast of a card. Trust me. Unless you like having driver issues and random in game crashes once every few hours, just get one card. For $400, a GTX 770 will be able to play all of those games in very high to ultra in 1080p. Hell, you could probably play tose games in those detail levels above 1080p with decent frame rates.


What cards and driver are you running? I'm running TRI and i have none of those issues


Asus GTX 660 DC20-2G5 + 550w OCZ ZT 550w 80 plus Bronze (min. of 490w required for these cards in SLI) and running latest stable drivers 320.49. The cards never go over 70c and my CPU never goes over 70c either. I'm pretty sure it is a driver issue because when the game crashes (happens in almost all games with demanding graphics such as Borderlands 2, Far Cry 3 and GTA IV in highest settings) a little window with "Nvidia driver error" pops up. Other owners of GTX 6xx series cards in SLI also report the same problem and many of them have huge PSU's with 750w to well over 1,000w. Also, everyone has zero errors in single card mode.


I'm running GTX660Ti's in SLi on a 620w PSU and I haven't had a single crash in BL2 and I run that with all the settings maxed out.
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July 15, 2013 7:20:28 AM

Yes I do tend to play for more than a few hours straight and I also then tend to leave the game on pause for a few hours at a time and I still haven't had any crashes.
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July 15, 2013 8:05:22 AM

I thought the GTX 680 was still NVIDIA's top of the line card apart from the 690 and the Titan. I read a few reviews for the GTX 770 and I'll probably get it and add a second card next year. Is SLI better than Crossfire? Is the GTX 770 4GB worth the extra cost over the 2GB?
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July 15, 2013 8:28:23 AM

u_gonna_squeal_b4_we_cookya said:
Do you play for more than a few hours straight? I can usually play a game for about 1 or 2 hours and then like clockwork, it crashes to the desktop and a driver error window pops up. If it was my PSU, wouldn't it just crash as soon as there is too much power being drawn from the PSU which is usually as soon as you start actual game play? I also was thinking that it could be my mechanical HDD going into power saving mode, but I turned that off and it still crashed after 1.5 hrs. If you go to the steam or Nvidia forums there are dozens of people complaining about the same error and it has been happening since around 310.xx drivers. I'm going to try a higher wattage PSU, but I don't see how it relates to a driver crash.

There are a lot of different reasons you could get these occasional crashes. It may not be SLI, it may also be other software that has issues at times when SLI is present. It could even be a hardware issue or one of many possibilities. Have you even tried disabling SLI and seeing if you still get the crash a few hours into a gaming session? It might even crash regardless.

Anyways, SLI pretty solid, but I still say you are best off with a single GPU unless you can't get the performance you want from a single card. Avoid Crossfire as well, at least until a fix happens.

I've not had crashing issues from either SLI or Crossfire. Even after playing hours. The problems with Crossfire aren't about stability, and I'm not aware of stability issues with SLI either.
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