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Should I SLI my GTX 670 or wait for Maxwell?

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  • SLI
  • Graphics
Last response: in Graphics & Displays
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January 4, 2014 1:16:39 PM

Hey, so I was wondering, considering 2014 is here and I expect the likes of Watch Dogs, Witcher 3 and The Division to kick my pc thoroughly in the nuts (not even mentioning Star Citizen, gonna have to SLI Volta cards for that lol), I should be getting my rig ready to be able to keep playing 1080p on ultra. Bear in mind I do have a 3D monitor, so I'd appreciate the luxury of being able to turn 3D on from time to time without tuning down graphical fidelity to garbage.

From what I'm hearing it seems Maxwell is still going to be on 28nm, even the flagship model, which is kind of underwhelming. Should I go SLI and wait for Volta? Or is the fact that both of my 670s will have only 2gb vram buffer a bad thing now? BF4 @ultra still never takes over 1500mb-ish of vram anyway, the only game that maxed it for me was Skyrim with approx. 200 mods.

So what do you guys think?

My other specs:
i7 3770K
16GB RAM @ 1600

More about : sli gtx 670 wait maxwell

January 4, 2014 2:13:25 PM

What MB do you have? If the 2nd PCIe X16 slot is only X4 bandwidth, it wouldn't be worth getting a 2nd card.
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January 4, 2014 2:27:38 PM

With 2x 670 you will play your games not only BF4 on max few years ahead. When maxwell will come they will cost alot, but the price will drop for 6xx and mainly for 7xx series. I would wait a bit to see what maxwell will bring us and then *if the price will drop, go for the 2nd 670.

Ooooor the best option would be to get a Gtx 780, wich will cost 500$ ( or less ) when the 8xx series will come.
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January 4, 2014 2:51:37 PM

clutchc said:
What MB do you have? If the 2nd PCIe X16 slot is only X4 bandwidth, it wouldn't be worth getting a 2nd card.


Asus Sabertooth Z77. As for the x4 bandwidth, really? I actually picked this mobo on the premise that I'd one day like to go for an SLI setup and the specs sheet says 2 x PCIe 3.0/2.0 x16. If it's still capable of only x4 speed, then it kinda sucks and I've been cheated. :/  Please do respond about this, I'd be very pissed to find out that my mobo is basically useless for SLI.

EDIT: I'm sorry, you said "IF". It's late, I'm not even reading properly now. Still, please tell me that my board is okay for SLI!

RulesSpew - you're probably right. The least I can do is wait for CES if Nvidia spills their beans about Maxwell.
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January 4, 2014 2:57:52 PM

Steamfluff said:
clutchc said:
What MB do you have? If the 2nd PCIe X16 slot is only X4 bandwidth, it wouldn't be worth getting a 2nd card.


Asus Sabertooth Z77. As for the x4 bandwidth, really? I actually picked this mobo on the premise that I'd one day like to go for an SLI setup and the specs sheet says 2 x PCIe 3.0/2.0 x16. If it's still capable of only x4 speed, then it kinda sucks and I've been cheated. :/  Please do respond about this, I'd be very pissed to find out that my mobo is basically useless for SLI.

EDIT: I'm sorry, you said "IF". It's late, I'm not even reading properly now. Still, please tell me that my board is okay for SLI!

RulesSpew - you're probably right. The least I can do is wait for CES if Nvidia spills their beans about Maxwell.


Lol... yeah, I said if. But that MB has X8, X8 SLI.
http://www.asus.com/Motherboards/SABERTOOTH_Z77/#specif...
So you are golden if you decide on dual GTX 670. And there's not a single (1 x GPU) card that would out game dual GTX 670s.
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January 4, 2014 3:20:19 PM

clutchc said:


Lol... yeah, I said if. But that MB has X8, X8 SLI.
http://www.asus.com/Motherboards/SABERTOOTH_Z77/#specif...
So you are golden if you decide on dual GTX 670. And there's not a single (1 x GPU) card that would out game dual GTX 670s.


Alright, thank you so much. I was always afraid of dual gpu setups in the past because of the microstuttering, glitches, unoptimized game profiles, etc. but a friend of mine got GTX 660 Ti SLI and it looked pretty damn smooth, so they must've ironed most of the bugs out. So I'll just look what Nvidia has to say at CES and then probably order it, seems like the more fun option. Hell, I'm piss poor at saving money properly, might just spend my christmas premiums on something that'll last. (Doesn't help that wages in Czech Republic are quite awful compared to the US and the hardware costs the same or slightly more over here than in US.)

Once again, thanks.
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January 4, 2014 8:00:29 PM

Steamfluff said:
clutchc said:


Lol... yeah, I said if. But that MB has X8, X8 SLI.
http://www.asus.com/Motherboards/SABERTOOTH_Z77/#specif...
So you are golden if you decide on dual GTX 670. And there's not a single (1 x GPU) card that would out game dual GTX 670s.


Alright, thank you so much. I was always afraid of dual gpu setups in the past because of the microstuttering, glitches, unoptimized game profiles, etc. but a friend of mine got GTX 660 Ti SLI and it looked pretty damn smooth, so they must've ironed most of the bugs out. So I'll just look what Nvidia has to say at CES and then probably order it, seems like the more fun option. Hell, I'm piss poor at saving money properly, might just spend my christmas premiums on something that'll last. (Doesn't help that wages in Czech Republic are quite awful compared to the US and the hardware costs the same or slightly more over here than in US.)

Once again, thanks.


If you notice in my sig below, I have a pair of GTX 660 OC cards too. Nvidia has done a good job eliminating micro-stutter.
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January 5, 2014 7:51:12 AM

Games like Ghosts, Crysis 3 and the Witcher 3 later this years push beyond the 2GB buffer. More and more games will be packing UHD textures, so my advice would be to wait till Maxwell. The 670 is still a capable and really SLI and multi-gpu configs bring problems, SLI is no what it used to be and Nvidia doesn provide SLI profile prompty anymore.
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January 6, 2014 7:07:37 AM

redeemer said:
Games like Ghosts, Crysis 3 and the Witcher 3 later this years push beyond the 2GB buffer. More and more games will be packing UHD textures, so my advice would be to wait till Maxwell. The 670 is still a capable and really SLI and multi-gpu configs bring problems, SLI is no what it used to be and Nvidia doesn provide SLI profile prompty anymore.


They might be, but since I'll be runing at 1080p, I'll hardly use them.

And for the SLI profiles - what? In all recent releases, Nvidia updated the SLI profiles a week or two BEFORE the actual games were released. (BF4, AC4:BF, Batman..)
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January 6, 2014 7:24:55 AM

I run dual GTX 770s 4GB in SLI on an MSI z77 mainboard and they run great. I run at 1440p so that is where I use the 4GB of vRAM. But if I was you I would probably get the second GTX 670 and you should be good for the foreseeable future if you continue to game at 1080p. As for issues with Micro-stuttering I have not really had any major issues and I play BF4, Ghosts, Crysis 3, AC4.
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January 6, 2014 8:27:50 AM

chitradev said:
I run dual GTX 770s 4GB in SLI on an MSI z77 mainboard and they run great. I run at 1440p so that is where I use the 4GB of vRAM. But if I was you I would probably get the second GTX 670 and you should be good for the foreseeable future if you continue to game at 1080p. As for issues with Micro-stuttering I have not really had any major issues and I play BF4, Ghosts, Crysis 3, AC4.


That's what I thought as well. Shame I can't even switch to AMD since my monitor (Asus VG278H) cost me 650$ and it supports Nvidia 3D Vision 2, so I'd basically throw that away with AMD. And obviously I'm not planning on switching to another screen, maybe in the distant future with the advent of Nvidia Volta architecture I might go for 1,5K.

The input is appreciated, especially since the only thing Nvidia revealed at CES so far is a stupid mobile chip I don't give a toss about - so I'm just gonna proceed with my order, last 2 cards in stock at local store and there might not be another shipment, since it's pretty dated already.
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