To SLI or not to SLI

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kameroncousins15

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Apr 13, 2016
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I'm currently using a GTX Asus 970 turbo trying to figure out if it would be better to just spend the $300 for another one and SLI them, or to save the money for a 980TI? What would be better when it comes to price to performance?
 
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and ofc the advantage when games doesnt proper support sli, are poorly optimized, or very late driver update ;)

if you already have 1 gtx 970, wait it out and see what happens in the upcoming months with Pascal/Polaris,

at best: they will be worth the wait/upgrade
at worst, they wont be worth the wait/upgrade, and you should be able to get a cheaper 900 series, weather another 970 or...
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10tacle

10tacle

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Dec 6, 2008
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The question is do you *need* 970 SLI/980Ti performance right now? For example, did you just upgrade to a 1440p monitor? FYI 970 SLI bests a 980Ti by about 10% on average. The only advantage a single 980Ti has over 970 SLI is in minimum frame rates due to the 980Ti having 6GB VRAM.
 
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Gnuffi

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Sep 14, 2013
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and ofc the advantage when games doesnt proper support sli, are poorly optimized, or very late driver update ;)

if you already have 1 gtx 970, wait it out and see what happens in the upcoming months with Pascal/Polaris,

at best: they will be worth the wait/upgrade
at worst, they wont be worth the wait/upgrade, and you should be able to get a cheaper 900 series, weather another 970 or 980ti,

just pay attention to the data once some official data are released(all we have atm are hype and rumour data)


 
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jerdle

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Oct 27, 2014
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I would strongly recommend against investing in 970 SLI. Especially with 970s.

Get one top of the line card. Only if you need more performance than one top end card can deliver should you get a second card.

Consider getting the top end Polaris/pascal release this summer. That is if NVidia releases an x80 this summer.
 
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10tacle

10tacle

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Dec 6, 2008
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It's not nearly as bad as people think...especially those who do not have it or have never had it. As a current 970 SLI and 680 SLI rig owner (and former GTX 275 SLI owner), that really hasn't been much of an issue for most of the games I've played. It depends on what games you play, but there's a reason most tech websites have SLI reviews in their archives for games: it works far more than not. Reviews like this one:

http://www.overclock3d.net/reviews/gpu_displays/asus_gtx980ti_strix_sli_review/1

SLI will never scale at 100%. For readers not sure what that means, my setup averages 75-80% in scaling overall among games, meaning that the second card gives 75-80% of the FPS increase when on paper it should give 100%...going from 50FPS to 90FPS instead of 50FPS to 100FPS as a hypothetical example. It gets even worse going into triple SLI where the third card only adds perhaps 35% on top of the second card bump. My biggest issue with SLI is the increased heat and noise output and power requirement compared to a higher end single GPU solution

With all that said, the original poster never stated why he wants to move up to SLI.
 
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10tacle

10tacle

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That's odd. What that would tell me is that the single card is being held back until a second card is added. :heink: What it could also mean is that the game developers added some code to take better advantage of multiple GPUs. Do you remember what game(s) that was?
 
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Sergeant_Sneaky

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Mar 25, 2015
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Could also be margin of error, or a benchmark that isn't identical each time, like GTA 5 where the spawning cars etc are mostly random.
 
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Mousemonkey

Mousemonkey

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Sep 3, 2006
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The last game that I played that scaled at 100% with SLi was a C.O.D title there may have been others since but I don't really take much notice TBH.
 
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