lun4tic said:
What? Google SLI problems and tell me SLI works well.
For one, their drivers BARELY support SLI. It's hit or miss whether or not it'll even detect that you have two cards installed. Two, you need to manually prepare a profile for every game you play to ensure it's running in SLI, because a majority of games wont detect it and use both cards. Three, you're using almost twice as much energy and creating almost twice as much heat. You're going to see that when your electric bill arrives.
I gave an SLI set-up a try, but it's not worth it. You pay for it somehow and it's a huge hassle. You're better off upgrading to a 560 or 570 and overclocking.
Funny. Go to AMD forums and look at all the people with crossfire issues. You can google it as well.
I ran with 1 5850 and had no problems. I added a second 5850 and began to experience the driver issues. Flicker in many games at the most inopportune times. I just assumed things would get better the next month with the driver release and they didn't. The they would release a "hotfix" the day after the initial driver release since there couldn't possibly be anything wrong with the drivers. I ran with 2 5850s for about 8 months and was still hoping they'd get everything all ironed out. My framerates were good, but I was always compromising. Flicker, GPU load on second card staying at 100% after gaming, HDMI Audio driver no longer install, etc... Once I added a 3rd and had a bunch of money tied up in crossfire and the drivers continued to be flawed, I decided there has to be a reason most of the world is consistently paying more for "equal" performance on Nvidia cards. I didn't want to believe I had to pay more for consistently good performance, but after getting consensus from other AMD crossfire users on the AMD forums and other source on the web, I decided to switch.
I bought a 580 and was impressed with the performance of the individual card. I was curious about SLI performance and wanted to compare it to my experience with crossfire (my question being "Does SLI suck, too?"), so I picked up another 580. This is when I really learned why more people are buying Nvidia. The things just work as expected. You don't have to do anything to make these cards behave like you assumed they would when you paid for them (and you're correct... you need the power to run them). I didn't have to wait for a driver release for all the flickering to go away. Google 'flicker' and any model from the '5xxx' on up and 'crossfire'.
Don't get me wrong, I had great framerates in crossfire, but it's the constant driver issues I won't accept. Every other PC in my house has a single AMD card in it and they work with no issues. I really think the single-card customer is AMD's bread and butter customer and it's cost-effective for them to focus on this customer.
When it comes to more than one card, I can't recommend AMD at this time.