R9 290 or SLI GTX 580 3GB? advice needed

madpierre · Mar 9, 2015

Hi Guys.
I currently have an R9 290 "X edition" (not a 290X) in my water-cooled i7 system. However while trying to upgrade the graphics in my older i7 920 system to sell it, I bought a pair of Palit GTX580 3GB cards at a cheap price. The GTX's already have water-blocks on them and I am wondering if I should replace the R9 (still air-cooled) in my current system with them. Would the sli setup be much faster than the R9 in games like Battlefield and Crysis? and would the PSU cope or would I need to upgrade - I don't really want to spend more if I can avoid it.

Full system spec as follows- Asus Maximus VI formula M/B, i7 4770k@4.6Ghz, 16GB Gskill ddr3 2400Mhz, VTX R9 290 X edition V2, Mushkin Deluxe 240GB SSD and Seagate 3TB data drive Silverstone 700W gold PSU. System is water cooled with D5 vario pump, PA120.3 60mm radiator in an NZXT switch 810 case,
I currently have 2 1920 x 1080 monitors but am looking to add a third in the near future. I also have a spare 280mm radiator which I would add in the loop if going SLI.

Calculagator · Mar 9, 2015

A stock R9 290 is faster than two stock GTX 580s in SLI. With overclocking, you might be able to push the 580s more, but I doubt you would ever have a significant benefit over the 290 especially considering the extra power and heat generation required.
Here's a comparison of a 290 vs sli'd 580s (really a 590, but the performance is very close)
http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/1185?vs=1068

madpierre · Mar 9, 2015

Thanks for the link. I am a bit surprised by that as on Tom's Graphics Hierarchy chart the single 580 is only 2 levels down from the 290. I would have expected a much bigger improvement from 2 of them. Also I wonder how much of the results were affected by the frame buffer size. 580's normally only have 1.5Gb but mine are the 3Gb variants which should affect high res results.

Calculagator · Mar 9, 2015

I looked a little deeper. I do think that two 580s in SLI should outperform the 590 by more than 10% with water cooling. The 590 ran into thermal/power problems and was clocked quite a bit lower than what you could achieve. I doubt the framebuffer size would make much difference on the anandtech benchmarks since at least most of the are designed to not hit framebuffer limits for anything over 1GB. Different resolutions don't seem to have a huge performance impact like they would if they were maxing the framebuffer.
The GTX 580 3GB is a great performer for 1080p, but when you turn the settings up, even SLI is not enough to push it ahead of a 290.

Calculagator · Mar 9, 2015

Here's a comparison of an R9 290, a GTX 580 3GB, and a GTX 590
http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/2013-vga-gpgpu/compare,2951.html?prod%5B6411%5D=on&prod%5B5445%5D=on&prod%5B5389%5D=on

madpierre · Mar 10, 2015

Calculagator :

That link is much more informative, thanks. I can see that in most games there is not any where near the difference in frame rates that I was expecting between the 580 and 590. Is this down to SLI not scaling well?
The 580 did come close and even better the R9 in some game settings, but the R9 tended to win in all the 'extreme' comparisons. Whatever is causing it it seems obvious from those results that I am better off sticking with the R9.
I will put one of the 580's in my old i7-920 system and if I manage to sell it I might buy another R9 and a pair of waterblocks :pt1cable:

Thanks for your help.

gatygun · Mar 23, 2015

Calculagator :

590 isn't 2x 580's people.

This is false, a 590 actually are not 2x 580's they are 2x 570's with 1,5v-ram each. There is a gap in performance between the two.

For example in metro 2033, sli 570 ( 590 ) hits 52 max while sli 580's hit 64. That's a big difference.

2x sli 580 perform about the same as a 780
the 290 is about equal towards that.

580's will probably suffer a bit performance wise against a 290 in newer games through older architectures.

gatygun · Mar 23, 2015

Calculagator :

590 isn't 580's they are 2 570's performance is a lot worse then.

madpierre :

You got adviced wrong, the 580's will give you 290's performance, just with double the heat etc etc because 2 cards.

The 290's has a new architecture which will perform a little better, but you will miss out on physx accelerations and all stuff that nvidia gives you + drivers support is a hell lot better.

Also the 290's have 4gb of v-ram which is interesting to go for over 3gb 580's. I wouldn't go 290 unless you want to crossfire them or hate sli/crossfire then i would rather pick up a cheap 580 second handed.

If you got 500 to spend, i would rather just buy at this day of age 2x 290's second handed for ~175 a piece and buy some water cooling for them with it to overclock.

Calculagator · Mar 23, 2015

gatygun :

Unless there is more than one version of the 590, this is false. The 590 is two 580 chips on a single card. They have the same cores/rops/texture fill units/memory bandwidth. They are clocked lower in order to stay within power/thermal limits. That is the only difference (and it is not insignificant). While it may give the 590 similar performance to 570s in SLI in some situations, they use different chips. I brought up the 590 because it is the closest thing I could find to make a direct comparison between 580s and the 290.
If you have any benchmarks comparing two 3GB 580s with a 290, I would love to see them.

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R9 290 or SLI GTX 580 3GB? advice needed

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