Scaling Nvidia or ATI

[dredj]

Hey everyone. When I build my new rig, I plan on either putting in a single 480 or HD 5970. As time goes on I will buy another after they've gone down in price to keep the system up to date. My question is, which will scale better or work better overall? I know the 5970 out performs the 480, but what about SLI/xFire performances? Not talking about heat or power consumption, just plan performance when adding an addition card. Thanks!

 

[hunter315]

Because the 5970 is already two GPUs when you add another you will be running quadfire which doesnt scale nearly as well as two way SLI does. Two 5970s at stock setting would probably perform only a little bit better than two GTX 480s in SLI.

 

[DXRick]

Here is a really good review: GeForce GTX 460 SLI review . I think that two GTX 460s in SLI, at $400, is the way to go if you don't need more than 1920x1200.

 

[Mousemonkey]

Guru3D took a look at dual 5970's back in November.

 

[TheGreatGrapeApe]

Screw Guru, those buncha dirty Hippies !!

A few recent reviews from Xbit compared GTX480s in SLi to HD5870s in Xfire and a single HD5970;

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/video/display/radeon-hd5800-3way-cf.html

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/video/display/geforce-gtx480-sli.html

Really depends on the game, some a single HD5970 can beat GTX480SLi and others where the HD5970 struggles against a single GTX480. Give you a good overal picture, especially since it includes minimum fps in most tests.

To bad they didn't add dual HD5970, but really that 4th chip (be it ATi or nV) has always struggled in getting good returns over 3.

 

[wolfram23]

IMO, you're probably best off going with either GTX 480 or 5870 as two of either of those will be beastly and easily max any game - I have CF 5850s and can already do that at 1920x1080. Otherwise go with just the 5970 and don't CF it, it'll still perform great. But yeah, I'd say the better bang for your buck is CF5870s since it's cheaper but will still destroy games, while SLI GTX480s will technically perform better, but in either case you'll still be maxing games out and getting over 60 fps.