HELP! new SLI or crossfire?

you should remember that a single more powerful card is always better then 2 cards in SLI or CFX.

that said you can look at the GTX680 or a GTX770

you should remember that a single more powerful card is always better then 2 cards in SLI or CFX.

that said you can look at the GTX680 or a GTX770

but you should also bear in mind that some games don't scale well for multi gpus and starting off with 2 cards also greatly reduces you upgradibility

but if you really want to....go for the GTX660ti s

but you should also bear in mind that some games don't scale well for multi gpus and starting off with 2 cards also greatly reduces you upgradibility

but if you really want to....go for the GTX660ti s

By your logic, when it's time to upgrade, you would buy a single more powerful card instead of adding another in sli/crossfire because a "single more powerful card is always better then 2 cards in SLI or CFX".

2xGTX 670 would be the minimum I'd recommend for upgrading from 3x GTX 480s. The options in this thread so far will not be much of an upgrade, even 2x7950.

may be you should read carefully....i said that because starting off with 2 GTX660ti now. you will be able to add one more 660. Instead if you start with a 780...you are free 2 add up more as and when needed

Sorry, try again.

Nope, that was 6 days ago, across 18 games, with all drivers up to date. Your link is 10 months old. Check your facts, please. The 7950 is meaningfully slower than the 670, unless you overclock it.

http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/MSI/GTX_760_HAWK/

7950 =/= 7950 Boost

And you can buy 7950s with clock speeds anywhere from 800 MHz to 925 MHz.

The 7950 needs to be clocked to about 950-975 MHz to match a stock GTX 670.

Where did you find it? I'd like to see where that chart came from

Don't move the goalposts. Your claim was this:

When 670's were released, they were slightly faster than 7950's. After some driver updates, 7950's are now faster in most games.

Click to expand...

And it's not true. Even if you bought the fastest factory OC'd 7950 on newegg, it is slower than a stock 670 on average. You need to overclock the 7950 - even a boost edition 7950 - to have it beat a 670.

And obviously the 7950 is the best value out there if you manually OC it. But that's not what I was talking about.

TechPowerUp is one of the top 5 review sites on the web. They are the inventors of GPU-Z and are probably the #1 site on the web in terms of reliability. Why? They use 18 gaming benchmarks, far more than any other website, and they use the latest drivers. When you factor in the latest/most popular games and the latest drivers, relative performance results tend to shift over time. In this case, performance has shifted decisively over time in favor of Nvidia cards. Even so, there's never been a chart that showed the 7950 on par with a GTX 670.
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/NVIDIA/GeForce_GTX_670/28.html

Crossfire versus SLI is the ultimate no-brainer. Most of us are aware of the long history of AMD's frame pacing problem and the recent Phase 1 "fix" in their 13.8 drivers. However, those drivers did not fix the issue for DirectX 9 games, OpenGL games, and multiple monitors. The drivers also provided only a software fix, which adds CPU overhead, for something that Nvidia corrected years ago and now addresses through its hardware. That means Nvidia hardware-based frame pacing works in all circumstances with no performance impact.

Those game incompatibilities mentioned earlier on up are predominantly Crossfire problems. Again, TechPowerUp out of their 18 gaming benchmarks found the following 6 games to scale poorly or display negative scaling in SLI: Assassin's Creed 3, Batman: Arkham City, F1 2012, StarCraft II, Skyrim, and World of Warcraft. And note, these are extremely popular games that have been around for a long time with still no proper driver support. As TPU said:
"So either AMD does not care or can't fix CrossFire support with these games millions of people play."
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/AMD/HD_7990/31.html

SLI doesn't suffer in the same way from a lack of game support, and if they did history suggests it would be a short-term issue before a driver fix was forthcoming. Nvidia even has Nvidia Update software to deliver the latest game profiles the moment they are released. HardOCP has written about this for years, and Guru3d made note of it in their recent review of GTX 760's in SLI:
"...over time NVIDIA has done a great job, micro-stuttering is a thing of the past and there are hardly any driver issues. And with triple A game titles, NVIDIA will have a driver for you at launch day ensuring your multi-GPU solution is supported."
http://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/geforce_gtx_760_sli_review,19.html

And again, just to give an example of real-world frustrations with Crossfire, here's a guy on this thread (link below) that went and got himself a very expensive 7990 and now has to use a frame limiter just to be able to play Far Cry 3. Let me repeat, he has to limit his FPS to 40 with a 7990 in order to get smooth performance using the latest 13.8 frame pacing drivers. And no, this is not a one-off isolated case.
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/id-1777649/870-7990-cry.html

We're having this comparison because YOU decided to try and pick on my recommendation without checking your facts.

Frame pacing was fixed in amd's latest beta drivers. And like i stated, compare the 670 to 7970 because they are similarly priced. Leave the 7950 out of this.

According to that link the guy with the 7990 is using the latest beta 2 driver and he still has problems so it would seem as though the driver hasn't fixed everything.

Perhaps you should read my recommendation again before making a fool of yourself any further.

Two 670s are the minimum upgrade that I believe to be worth it over 480s.

Stuttering is not the same thing as frame pacing. They are beta drivers after all. 13.4 was around 120mb. 13.8 beta 2 was around 240mb. They have some work to do still. I think most of there issues will be ironed out when they are released.