Gtx Titan or add a 3rd 680?

[Erk1209]

Hello friends,

It's tax return season and it's time to reward myself. Before continuing here are my system specs:

i7-3770k at stock
16gb Corsair Vengeance
Samsung 830 512GB SSD
Intel DZ77-GA70k motherboard
2x EVGA GTX 680 Superclock Signature 2GB
1000W Seasonic Platinum PSU
3x Samsung S23A700D at 5890x1080 (bezel corrected)

Now, I can play games comfortably at surround resolution but typically have to turn off eye candy to stay at 50fps or better (TressFX made me laugh at the hit my cards took). I'm thinking of adding a 3rd 680 to be able to play my games totally maxed out because I'm an idiot.

I'm wondering if adding a 3rd card would be worth it or if I should sell off my 680s in favor of a Titan with the plan to add a second one down the road. The logic there being I wouldn't have to swap boards (GA70K only has two PCIe slots) and the 6GB of memory on the Titan may help on my resolutions.

Does anyone have any experience with a set up like this? Anyone move from SLI 680s to a single Titan?

I appreciate your thoughts and advice

 

[vmem]

the third 680 will hit the point of diminishing returns hard. here is a fairly old benchmark to illustrate my point (bare in mind that driver support has improved, but is nowhere optimal)
http://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/geforce_gtx_680_3_way_sli_review,14.html

Now back when those benchmarks were taken last year, you can see that a third 680 won't give you jack. it's improved since then, and while I haven't being able to find a reliable set of benchmarks, memory seems to tell me that a third 680 will give you performance improvement around 50% of a 680's full performance.

Meanwhile, the ability for Titans to SLI seems to be amazing. keep in mind that one Titan gets beat by a pair of 680s (which you already have) according to many benchmarks including ones here at TH:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/geforce-gtx-titan-performance-review,3442-9.html

so yeah, unless you're willing to pay $2000 for a pair of Titans or more, I would just sit on your 680s for now and wait for next gen

 

[ilysaml]

That resolution will never be satisfied, whatever you pop in. A third card usually doesn't scale properly in SLI/CF setup and may have negative scaling on the 2 other cards. A GTX Titan is not faster than 2 GTX 660 TIs in SLI, so how about Titan in compare with GTX 680s SLI?

 

[Erk1209]

I definitely see your points. I really enjoy surround and I guess I just have to accept the current trade off of not being able to max a game out. I could pull the trigger if the Titan was $700 or so, but $2000 for what looks like a marginal performance increase is tough to swallow. And I still don't think I would be able to turn every graphics setting up with reckless abandon.

 

[vmem]

I definitely see your points. I really enjoy surround and I guess I just have to accept the current trade off of not being able to max a game out. I could pull the trigger if the Titan was $700 or so, but $2000 for what looks like a marginal performance increase is tough to swallow. And I still don't think I would be able to turn every graphics setting up with reckless abandon.

Not only that, but also you'll be putting yourself into a very small niche of "power-users" with a triple card set-up for 3 monitor eyefinity gaming. few people can afford this, and even fewer people would bother and spend the money to get a large enough case to accommodate everything. This all translates to you being pretty low on a company, be it Nvidia or a game studio's list of de-bugging and beta-testing. shelling out $2-3k just to have the opportunity to spend hours tweaking settings for each game before you get to play it just isn't worth it

 

[ilysaml]

I definitely see your points. I really enjoy surround and I guess I just have to accept the current trade off of not being able to max a game out. I could pull the trigger if the Titan was $700 or so, but $2000 for what looks like a marginal performance increase is tough to swallow. And I still don't think I would be able to turn every graphics setting up with reckless abandon.

That's the point, since the rising of Titan, we saw that this card should have lied in the $600-$650 territory. The most strange thing is that the scaling of Multi-Titans are so damn good, outperforms 2 GTX 690s in Quad SLI.

 

[Erk1209]

Thanks for your responses, sorry for the delay.

The Titan is definitely out. The more benchmarks I see the less I'm impressed for $1000 a pop.

Looking at benchmarks like http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/NVIDIA/GeForce_GTX_Titan_SLI/24.html I can see games which leave me right on the fence. Some games seems to scale fairly well with a 3rd 680, others not at all.

I'm leaning away from making any moves at the moment but just for curiosity's sake would a 3770k bottleneck three 680s?

Thanks for your opinions

 

[ilysaml]

OC it as possible as you can to avoid any FPS drop.

 

[vmem]

Thanks for your responses, sorry for the delay.
I'm leaning away from making any moves at the moment but just for curiosity's sake would a 3770k bottleneck three 680s?

Thanks for your opinions

dropping the Titan and playing the "wait and see" game is a smart move.

as for bottle necking, the 3770k wouldn't bottleneck a 680 perse, but the chipset/mobo might. let's keep in mind that we typically have something like 16 lanes dedicated by Intel to PCIe 3.0, this gets split to 8X each when you SLI, which is fine because PCIe3.0 is fast enough as it is. now to further split this into 8x; 4x; 4x is not acceptable for triple SLI and will bottleneck your whole system... of course, most mobo manufacturers realizes this, and typically adds a third party controller to increase the number of PCIe3.0 lanes so you can at least achieve 16x; 8x; 8x for three-way SLI. while this looks fine and all on paper, it also adds additional processing overhead to the overall architecture. It's generally assumed that this isn't a major issue (since driver support for 3 and 4-way SLI is way behind as you've seen), but it's still an important factor to bear in mind. if you're serious about going 3/4way SLI, it's worth thinking about upgrading to a LGA2011 system which has additional native PCIe lanes.