Should I send back? SLI Help

[chayo234]

Hello everyone!

I'm a little confused right now because I bought a Sapphire Radeon HD 6870 to upgrade from my Nvidia GTX 260 however when I ran FPS software, it was actually lower than my Nvidia card!

Not sure why that is... would resolution matter? I believe it's the same setting but not sure.

Also, Newegg just got a recent deal for Nvidia GTX 550 Ti (Fermi) for $115 each! I was wondering if I should send back my Radeon HD 6870 and get 2 Nvidia GTX 550 and SLI it? I bought the Radeon HD 6870 for $165

I have a Silverstone ST60F PSU with 600W, could the PSU handle it? My motherboard is new and is SLI capable. I'm also wondering if I have enough power plugs to give juice to the extra card...

Thank you for all the help!

-Charlie

 

[DM186]

First off I wouldn't get the 550's they are a very weak card the 6870 is a better card. Your PSU is big enough what you need to make sure that your PSU supports SLI or Crossfirex then it will have the nessacery cables. There are adaptor cable s you can buy just in case.

The reason I can tell you not to get the 550's is I am using two of them in SLI now and I wish I had bought the 560 ti's. But if you do get them you will still have enough power to run both of them. Here is a chart to show you what I am talking about.

http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/ASUS/GeForce_GTX_550_Ti_Direct_Cu/23.html

 

[chayo234]

Wow.. how does the lower end GTX 460-470's outperform the GTX 550?

My PSU says it supports SLI/Crossfire so it should be ok. And I have a bunch of adaptors. Reason why I thought maybe the SLI was a good deal was because I saw an SLI of GTX 460 topping out Nvidia GTX 570 cards. But now that I see that the GTX 550 performs very poor compared to GTX 460, I'm starting to shy away from it.

 

[chayo234]

Does windows xp support direct11? Maybe that is why I am seeing poor performance? I am currently using Windows XP 32bit, would upgrading to windows 7, increase my performance?

 

[tlmck]

Perhaps this chart can help.

http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/2011-gaming-graphics-charts/3DMark11-Gamer,2659.html

 

[DM186]

I have read that you can and I have read you can't. I guess all you can do is try to see if XP will handle DX 11. But win 7 is a lot better in my opinion better than XP. Again it has it's pro's and con's.

 

[Sunius]

Does windows xp support direct11? Maybe that is why I am seeing poor performance? I am currently using Windows XP 32bit, would upgrading to windows 7, increase my performance?

No, windows XP don't support directx 11. Upgrading to windows 7 will help for sure, as Directx 11 is way faster API than DirectX 9, and that's the sole reason why there there so many dramatic graphic changes when we switch from DirectX 9 -> 10 -> 11.