Anub1s said:
Dollar for dollar IMO, you're better off going SLI with two 770s. The pricing of the 780s and the difference in scaling between them and the 770s in SLI is so not worth the price you're paying, again in my opinion. I would go with two high clocked 770s, and put a custom water cooling loop in there and include the GPUs in that loop. You're wasting so much space in that case right now it isn't even funny, especially since you're talking about making this a "show" rig.
I understand your point of view but I believe there are some flaws(as always this is all in my opinion). Dollar for dollar 770's are better price to performance yes. one reason I am looking at 780's is for overall longevity. I know future proofing is impossible but having that 3GB of GDDR5 will eventually be needed especially if I want to use a higher resolution or possibly 3 screens. I will however be running a main monitor and a companion so i think 3GB of GDDR5 is justifiable. If I look at GTX 770's with 4gb, then a reference GTX 780 is only 50 or so more dollars, not a huge amount of money to upgrade. Secondly referring to the custom water cooling loop, the CPU block and both GPU blocks almost cost as much as another 770, not to mention the rads, pump, res, and fittings. As I pointed out I would like to keep costs down to around 500 a piece and adding water cooling would add to my overall price of the build. I created this thread to see if the extra 50 bucks for non reference actually gives a noticeable improvement even if I do overclock on reference and to compare the price to performance between the two. If the improvement is not noticeable even after overclocks it would then come down to aesthetics. Personally I like the GTX 780 reference aesthetics better than say a Windforce. Then it comes the noise and heat output of both kinds of cards to see if that was worth extra cash. I would then take that info and make a decision. Thirdly I would like to point out that when the system is put together I believe I am NOT wasting space. I will have the biggest motherboard it can fit and also the biggest AIO Liquid CPU cooler on the market, and I would be using 4 out of the 7 PCIE expansion slots of graphics cards. Hardly wasting space I think. Fourthly, I stated that this was a show rig and HIGH END GAMING rig, If I wanted pure show, I would have 2 lower end cards under water but I want performance to last for a very very long time.
Also, putting GTX 770s under water would be useless from a gaming and performance standpoint after cost is taken into account. Any card that is clocked high as you suggest comes with a more than adequate air cooling design so why water cool? Water cooling makes sense on Radeon R9 290x cards that run very hot.
Besides that, any other info to help?