Triple crossfire vs One good gpu?

Kaleb Shubert

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Mar 13, 2014
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For my first build, which I will use for gaming, should I use three

XFX Double Dissipation R7-260X-CDF4 Radeon R7 260X 2GB 128-Bit GDDR5 PCI Express 3.0 x16 HDCP Ready CrossFireX Support Video ...

or one

XFX Black Edition Double D R9-280A-TDBD Radeon R9 280 3GB 384-Bit GDDR5 PCI Express 3.0 HDCP Ready CrossFireX Support Video Card

or two

EVGA 02G-P4-3063-KR GeForce GTX 660 2GB 192-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 3.0 SLI Support Video Card w/ ACX Cooler
 
Solution
The 280 would be the best option. You don't have to worry about SLI/Crossfire being supported, and will be quieter and cooler. The 280 will get you Ultra/Max in pretty much everything right now, and if you go that way, you can upgrade to dual 280s in the future; much better than anything listed here :)
The 280 would be the best option. You don't have to worry about SLI/Crossfire being supported, and will be quieter and cooler. The 280 will get you Ultra/Max in pretty much everything right now, and if you go that way, you can upgrade to dual 280s in the future; much better than anything listed here :)
 
Solution
I don't think the 260x even supports triple Crossfire, that tends to only really be an option when you move up to the higher end cards. Lower midrange products like the 260x will typically only support Crossfire with two cards. Generally a single card is better, and one thing to keep in mind is that you do start to hit diminishing returns with SLI and Crossfire once you go beyond 2 cards, games don't scale quite as well with 3 or 4 GPUs.

The 2 660 setup does offer the most raw power, but as said above, harnessing all that power is dependent on driver and game support. If you buy a lot of games on release day, you may wind up having to play with just one card initially while you wait for Nvidia to create SLI profiles for that particular game. If you play a lot of Early Access or Open Beta games, a lot of those titles likely won't have SLI support at all, leaving you using just one card.