Upgrade Options for BF3 Ultra

[lzlaxhacker]

Well, Battlefield 3 is fast approaching and I'm looking to play it on Ultra settings. I run a single monitor at 1920x1080 from a Core i5 750 (stock speeds, could overclock) with 8gb of Corsair XMS3 RAM and a GTX470(currently). I'd be willing to get a new power supply, if need be, but my current one is a high quality 650watt PSU. Also, my case should be plenty large enough to fit any video card. Here are options I'm looking at, and I'd like to avoid overkill for the resolution I run:

a) GTX 570s in SLI
b) Radeon 6990

...I'm a little more inclined to the single-card option as I've read about the micro-stuttering issues dual cards may have and I believe the architecture my processor runs on limits multiple cards to 8x each, rather than the full 16x a single card would have...not sure how that effects performance, however.

Anyways, all I'd like to be able to do is play Battlefield 3 on Ultra. Let me know what my best option is, and if my processor will bottleneck either option. Thanks!

 

[boldor]

Difference between runnin 8x crossfire/sli and 16x is almost not notable.
As for the GPU's your totally right. When you can, you should go with a single card... sure, dual cards may give u a few more fps's but it does complicate things.

 

[kajabla]

Actually, high-end dual cards don't have bad microstuttering issues: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/radeon-geforce-stutter-crossfire,2995-15.html
Those problems show up more at the 460 end.
The 6990 is always a bad choice. It's not a single GPU, so it would have the same issues (it's powerful enough that this isn't a problem, but that holds for the 570s too). It's crazily loud, quite hot and unnecessarily expensive.

 

[lzlaxhacker]

Good to know, kajabla...thanks! I'll cross the 6990 off my list then. What do you think my best dual-GPU option is? Or do you think I'd be ok with a single GTX580?

 

[kajabla]

The best dual-card setup is 2x580, of course
but 570s would be pretty sweet. A 580 might not get you 60fps on the best settings, but I'm not sure. I haven't actually seen BF3 benchmarks, but you might be able to find them.

 

[lzlaxhacker]

All good information, everyone, I appreciate it. What do you think of getting 2 Sapphire Radeon 6950 Toxic's in Crossfire? They have the BIOS switch so they can be flashed to 6970's, so essentially, 6970's in Crossfire.