SLI and G90 Questions

SLI is rarely worth it, by the time games really take advantage the next gen of cards come out and a single card has more power than the 2 you have, at which point you sell the single card and by a new single card

Crytek have said that Crysis will be tuned to allow full settings to High on a GTX, so just hunt for a good deal on a GTX and know you probably won't need to upgrade for around a year (seeing as the 8800's will have been out for a year when Crysis comes out, it's fair to assume that it'll take another year for games to take advantage of G92 - giving you plenty of time to wait for some price drops on as well).

To start from your last question, sli never doubles the performance of one card and in most games it rarely reaches +50%, so in my humble opinion it is plain waste of money and energy (because the second card draws the same amount of power as the first)

I think that most probably we will see the next gen of cards to utilize 2 GPUs, at least the high end ones. SLI will not be abandoned though.

Now, about your strategy. I think that at this junction with your monitor and depending on the games you want to play, the best value for money solution would be an ATI 1950Pro with 512MB of ram. It would cost you around $ 160, about $100 less than a 8800GTS 320. You can play any existing game @high res with medium to high eye candy on, again depending on the game. Wait until DX10 titles are out, check out real benchmarks of real DX10 games with existing cards, see what ATI and Nvidia are planning for the near future and then decide what card will cover your needs. Next gen cards will be less power hungry, will incorporate more and faster ram and will cost the same, or a little bit more than today's cards and i think that their announcement is really just around the corner! Maybe we will get to see some competition for the Christmas market, so prices may well surprise us (or not!) but anyway i think that, right now, waiting is the name of the game.

Just my two cents. Good luck!

I would just get one 8800 GTX. If we had some definite info instead of just FUD things would be different. Going with the temporary card you expose yourself to these risks:

1. what if the G90 card is released on Sep 14, 2008? Rumours say Christmas 2007, but nobody knows for sure. Delays have been known to happen in the video card field

2. what if the G90 requires PCI 2.0, an 1400W PSU, and it's 16" long? You won't be able to just replace cards in the PC you build next month.

Also, is it really worth it, financially? Let's say you buy the 7600 GT for $80 and a year from now you sell it for $20. Or you buy the 8800 GTX for $500 and a year from now you sell it for $200. Going with the 7600GT you pay $60, as opposed to $300, but for the $240 savings you have to play a year with a crappy card. $240 is good money, but since you're asking about GTX SLI I'm guessing you make that amount in a day or two at work.

Sorry about the rant. I have the same problem and I'm frustrated because nVidia stays quiet and makes it hard to make an intelligent decision

That's all awesome advice people, thanks for that!

I completely hear what your saying about the SLI'ed GTX's, not giving you twice the performance, so it's a bit hard really to justify the outlay.

I'm starting to lean towards a single GTX now, and will look at what's about for an upgrade in 18 months time or so.

I'm fine with swapping out the video card for the latest tech, in fact have done it that way for a long time, but I REALLY hate having to junk multiple components in a system in order to get good recent high end stuff.

What sort of worst case scenarios are we looking at here for when next gen cards come out (e.g. replace mother board for PCI 2.0? Could that also mean the rams gotta go and a new CPU???) - Apologies for the newbie type questions... It's been 4 yrs since I've had a PC, so I've got WAY behind the eight ball on understanding everything.

Well, to get PCI-E 2.0 you would need an X38-based mobo (or something else that hasn't been announced yet but wil be there in 18 months). It's very likely (but not 100% sure) that these mobos will require DDR3 and you'll have to replace your DDR2. You may find one that works with DDR2 but doesn't have some other things you'd want and which are common 18 months from now.

I think the CPU should be fine, for example even now lots of new mobos still support Pentium 4. But you'll want a new CPU in 18 months anyway, if it's $266 and has 8 cores at 4.5 GHz 8O (Just guessing here, this is not insider info from Intel, unfortunately)

What about the case: an Antec P182 for example fits the 8800 GTX and a 750W PSU, but without too much spare room. It might be too small for the next card and a (much) more powerful PSU.

In terms of case, I'm not sure exactly, It's going to be an Alienware system, so whatever they are.

P.S. Does anyone know of any articles that benchmark SLI'd cards against single cards. (I'm interested to see how dual 8800 GTS 640mb cards stack up against a single 8800 GTX)

I seriously doubt theyd release the g90 anytime soon. Especially since lower types of g80's are coming out now.

Here is some comparisons:
http://www.hothardware.com/article [...] te/?page=2
http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=35725

Remember your LCD will only refressh @70 so you won't see much difference in game play. But...your money..., your call.

If you have the extra money get 1 8800GTX and your computer will be fine for the next 18 months. Already some preliminary benches with DX10 games show that you get playable frame rates with this GPU.

Bear in mind that the next nvidia G92 GPU is coming out at the end of Q4 07 will be twice as fast and probably will cost you the same amound of money. If you don't mind buy the 8800GTS 320 which will cost you $300 less, is only 30% slower than GTX and will be ok with DX10 games for the next 18 months. Probably you won't be able to put everything in high detail in order to get playable frame rates for the next year DX10 games but the same can be said for GTX.

So save your money and next year you could spend the rest $300 to get G90 series mainstream GPU. It will be twice as fast as this one so you can have all eye candy enabled with playable frame rates for the next year.