1 Video card or 2 for $500 budget

[bitten by ht]

My PC has 2 video cards (ATI Radeon HD 5750 1GB GDDR5 16X PCIe Video Card ) and my son notices that Shogun 2 lags on high settings. I was thinking about upgrading the video cards and want to know the pros and cons of using 1 card vs 2 cards.

Option 1
Radeon HD 7970 for $430 (rated in this forum best PCIe card for $430)

Optoin 2
2 Radeon HD 7870 in Crossfire for a total of $520

The "best Graphic cards for Sept 2012" on this site stated this about a single GTX 670 vs multi-card configurations:

The GTX 670 delivers such impressive performance under $400 that we find it hard to recommend higher-performing (but sometimes-inconsistent) multi-card configurations for more money. We'll call out some of the most promising options, though, especially for folks with one of these cards already installed: two Radeon HD 7850s in CrossFire for $410, two Radeon HD 7870s in CrossFire for $520, and finally, two GeForce GTX 670s in SLI for $760.

Is it correct to assume that I cannot use the GTX 670 since Nvidia does SLI and my motherboard does crossfire so the GTX 670 isn't relevant to me ?

Below is my configuration:


CPU : AMD Phenom™II X6 1090T Six-Core CPU w/ HyperTransport Technology

Hard Drive: 750GB SATA-II 3.0Gb/s 16MB Cache 7200RPM HDD (750GB x 2 (1.5 TB Capacity) Raid 0 Extreme Performance

RAM: : 8GB (2GBx4) DDR3/2000MHz Dual Channel Memory Module(Corsair or Major Brand)

Motherboard : Asus M4A87TD EVO AMD 870 Chipset CrossFireX Support DDR3 Socket AM3 ATX w/ 7.1 Audio, GbLAN, IEEE1394a, USB3.0, SATA-III, RAID, 2 Gen2 PCIe, 1 PCIe X1, & 3 PCI

OS: Microsoft(R) Windows(R) 7 Home Premium (64-bit Edition)

POWERSUPPLY: 700 Watts - XtremeGear SLI/CrossFireX Ready Power Supply

 

[snipersam15]

7970 for sure getting the best single card you can is always the best option.
Cant go wrong with a 7970 a nice MSI model that supports 3x over-voltage will give you amazing overclocking potential.
Don't forget that in the future you can get another 7970 at a way lower price when you decide you need an extra boost in performance.

 

[Deleted member 217926]

You can run a GTX 670, you just can't run 2 in Sli.

A single more powerful card is almost always better than a less powerful dual card setup. With a single card you don't have microsttutering issues and some games do not support dual card options so in some cases you could be stuck with using only 1 card anyway.

 

[amuffin]

Single card!