Will three 780ti bottleneck the 2500k?

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neilhartop

Honorable
Aug 16, 2013
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Hi guys.

I'm currently running three screens (2x 1920x1200 and 1x2560x1440) and I'm looking to invest in a third evga acx 780 ti SC and replace the middle screen (2560x1440) with a 4k monitor.the Samsung 3840x2160 which is a bargain for £400

I'm concerned that the cpu which is a intel 2500k OC to 4.8ghz (100% stable) will bottle neck the three cards. I'd ideally not want to also replace the CPU if possible as I'm wanting to wait till the new intel CPU 'skylake' are released before updating the motherboard and CPU.

What
You guys think I should do?

 
Solution
techgeek
The traditional way would be to look at the GPU usage while in game and make sure it was close to 100%. Unfortunately that only works reliably with a single GPU. Since the scaling is poor going from 2 to 3 cards in SLI, even when you aren't CPU bound, you might find that your GPU's aren't pegged at 100%.

You could check to see what your CPU usage is while running a game. My guess is that as long as the usage isn't too high, chances are your GPU's aren't waiting on it. Of course that's not too reliable either.

The other thing you could try doing is run a game that you know benefits form Tri-SLI. Bench / test it with two cards record the performance and then run it again with three cards. If you see an your performance scale up by...
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unknownofprob

unknownofprob

Illustrious
Oct 3, 2013
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I normally advise not going triple SLI, as the scaling isn't right and you get less performance from the third card, as it's around a 65-70% increase in per card performance compared to SLI with two cards is a 85-90%. You sure have a nice rig!

That said, for three screens of such high resolution, you'll have to get three, no other option

I would consider getting the R9 290X, as the extra GB of Vram helps in multiple monitors and ultra high resolutions, though you will get a bottleneck with three of those.
 
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neilhartop

Honorable
Aug 16, 2013
51
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10,630
I would never use AMD cards for many reasons. First I do a lot of editing and use cuda cores. Secondly I already have two 780 ti cards so why would I change? Thirdly they run too hot and drivers are unreliable in my experience.

I'm well aware of sli scaling but I'm able to pick up the third card in exchange for some editing work. Also 4k will eat a lot of my frames for gaming so is like to get as high frame count as possible.
 
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techgeek

techgeek

Splendid
Apr 11, 2004
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The traditional way would be to look at the GPU usage while in game and make sure it was close to 100%. Unfortunately that only works reliably with a single GPU. Since the scaling is poor going from 2 to 3 cards in SLI, even when you aren't CPU bound, you might find that your GPU's aren't pegged at 100%.

You could check to see what your CPU usage is while running a game. My guess is that as long as the usage isn't too high, chances are your GPU's aren't waiting on it. Of course that's not too reliable either.

The other thing you could try doing is run a game that you know benefits form Tri-SLI. Bench / test it with two cards record the performance and then run it again with three cards. If you see an your performance scale up by an acceptable amount, then you should be good. I would look around for some reviews with benchmarks for Tri-SLI where they test scaling to get an idea of how much the third card adds in terms of scaling. I know Tom's has done some, PC Perspective has, AnandTech, HardOCP, and I'm sure there are others. Of course you'll have to pick a game that is used in the article since scaling is a game specific.

I still think a quad core running at 4.8GHz is plenty fast enough to handle your GPU's without a bottleneck. I've seen many articles that have shown little to no difference with Hyperthreading when it comes to gaming.
 
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