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SLI Help (Wait or do it)

Tags:
  • AMD
  • Gigabyte
  • SLI
  • Motherboards
  • Graphics
Last response: in Graphics & Displays
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August 4, 2013 7:29:01 PM

Current relevant system specs are:

GIGABYTE GA-970A-D3 AM3+ AMD 970 SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX AMD Motherboard

EVGA GeForce GTX 560 Ti Superclocked 1024 MB GDDR5

I don't really NEED to update my system per se, as I get good performance in most everything, but I'd like to get better performance in my extensively modded Skyrim and also to prepare my system for the next gen games coming out. I get serious frame drops in Skyrim (which is partially due to having over 200 mods, texture packs, and enbseries running at the same time and the game engine simply buckling) but I also can't consistently reach 60 FPS in every game, which I want to be able to do by next gen. It's definitely not my 16GB of RAM or 8 core 3.5 Ghz processor so I'm left with (presumably) a VRAM deficiency.

I don't really need this upgrade, as I said before, so I'm trying to keep a low budget. Upgrading my card to a single higher end GPU is simply too expensive, so I was taking a look at doing an SLI config (I've never done SLi before. My current GPU is discontinued and therefore prohibitively expensive but I found a ZOTAC nVidia GeForce GTX560 Ti 1 GB DDR5 with the same specs that should be compatible. Since my current motherboard only has one PCI slot running at x16 and the other running at x4, I would have a bottleneck, so I'd also have to upgrade my motherboard to a GIGABYTE GA-990FXA-UD3 AM3+ AMD 990FX SATA 6Gb/s motherboard, which has 2x16. All said and done, I could do this upgrade for less than $300.

Is it worth it to do this? Should I wait and buy a single high end GPU during the holidays when there are sales? Should I go ATI and do a crossfire config since the new gen of consoles is based around those cards and processors?

Thanks for your help.

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a b V Motherboard
August 4, 2013 7:59:47 PM

You really haven't looked around much if you think you can't upgrade to something significantly better w/o breaking past your $300 budget. You can get a GTX 760 for about $250, which will be anywhere from 25% to 50% faster than your current 560Ti, and with double the VRAM, you'll be able to get a lot more mileage out of it for high-res texture/poly mod packs. Save up money later for a better motherboard, and later down the road, add another 760 for sli and you'll have a machine that will run almost anything at max settings @1080 for quite some time.

That's what i'd do anyways.
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