Confused by the new 570

[Vagus]

Firstly, yay first post. I've been reading Toms forever, finally decided to register lol >.<

So according to the 570 review, it seems to be a solid contender for the 350-400 dollar single card solution.
Up until I read the review my plan was to grab a set of SLI 1GB GTX 460s at roughly the $415 price range. Now I'm contemplating a single card solution.

But now I am confused, I'm needing to retire my loyal 8800 GTs, and have a budget of about 400-425, with a small amount of wiggle room. The dual SLI 460s seem attractive because of the price point, and I was (mistakenly?) lead to believe that it would out perform the Crossfire 6850s.

But now the article says:

"Of course, that means the $30 extra you pay for two 6850s is worthwhile compared to Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 570."

So I guess my confusion is basically:

SLI 1GB GTX 460s

or

Single GTX 570

or

Crossfire 6850s






The rest of the system is:

i7-970 (yay intel retail edge!)
Asus x58 Sabertooth
12 GB DDR 3 1333


Any clarification is useful.

 

[tigrc]

I would go for the single card option and SLi it later if needed.

 

[rockyjohn]

I would be inclined to go with a single card option which leaves open SLI later if needed.

Did you read the THG review on the 570:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/geforce-gtx-570-gf110-performance,2806.html

It states:

"The bottom line today is that Nvidia has a solid solution for anyone looking to run one high-performance graphics card. It incorporates the things we liked about GeForce GTX 580 for $150 less. AMD has a better value in two CrossFire’d Radeon HD 6850s, but you have to be willing to give up four expansion slots worth of space on your CrossFire-capable motherboard. "

The relative performance also varies slightly by game, resolution, and settings. What are your preferences?

If you use a higher resolution monitor, or expect to in the future, you might also want to consider the better SLI scaling over CF in resolutions above 1920x1280, as reported here:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/crossfire-sli-scaling,2742.htm

Finally, I assume you have already confirmed that your PSU can provide the power and connectors required.

 

[tigrc]

Ummm, the 6950 and 6970 in CF scale better than 570 in SLi, but the overall performance is about the same of a 6970 and 570.

 

[17seconds]

A single GTX570 is a better value than 6950's in Crossfire by about 43%:

"NVIDIA got it right once again. There is a perfect balance of price, performance-level, and power-draw, it all fell in the right place. The GTX 570 is giving you performance level on-par with the GeForce GTX 480, but at a very reasonable price, and at surprisingly good power draw, heat, and noise levels."
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/ASUS/GeForce_GTX_570/31.html

"The GeForce GTX 570 is impressive to say the least."
http://www.hardocp.com/article/2010/12/07/nvidia_geforce_gtx_570_video_card_review/10

"Speaking of AMD, the ATI graphics team at default driver settings applies an image quality optimization which can be seen, though very slightly and in certain conditions. It gives their cards ~8% extra performance. NVIDIA does not apply such a tweak and opts better image quality. We hope to see that move from AMD/ATI soon as well.
http://www.guru3d.com/article/geforce-gtx-570-review/21

"With no single card alternative on the market right now the only competition is the GeForce GTX 460 1GB SLI and the Radeon HD 6850 CF. The Radeon in particular should not be underestimated – it can trounce the GTX 570 almost at will – however it’s dogged by the fact that 6850 prices are running high right now, putting it at a $30+ price premium over the GTX 570. And of course both multi-GPU solutions face the usual caveats of uneven performance scaling, more noise, and a reliance on driver updates to unlock the 2nd GPU on new games. As with the GTX 580 we’d pick the simplicity of a single-GPU setup over the potential performance advantages of a multi-GPU setup, but this is as always a personal decision."
http://www.anandtech.com/show/4051/nvidias-geforce-gtx-570-filling-in-the-gaps/16

 

[Vagus]

Best answer selected by Vagus.

 

[Vagus]

Thanks for the responses, it seems the 570 seems to have the price performance edge and that might allow me to pick up some tighter timed memory with the money I saved.

Thanks again.

 

[Maziar]

This topic has been closed by Maziar