Multiple Video Cards or One?

Arcane1

Primarily for playing MMOs. SW:TOR in particular. I am planning on upgrading the video in a few months when I get my Income Tax. Should I spend all that money on one card, or multiple linked cards.

I have an i7, 16GB ram, and my motherboard will support up to 3 cards. I only have/use one monitor.

Pariel

What size monitor? What (if any) card are you running now?

In all likelihood, the answer is one card. How much money are you willing to drop, though? Are you interested in using a higher resolution monitor, or more monitors in the future?

Arcane1

My monitor: http://www.hannsg.com/US/EN/Products/LCD Monitors/Common.aspx?productId=143
My current card: ATI Radeon HD 4550 1GB

Ego

At certain price ranges a dual card setup will beat a single card setup, and vice versa. Easiest thing to do would be to pick a budget and then ask in the computer build thread about recommended GPU choices at that budget.

You're just using 1920x1080 so you'll have a whole slew of options depending on just how fast you want to be.

Tef

If it's a few months away (I don't know when exactly your country gives tax return payouts), you might want to look at the new series of GPUs emerging from about mid to late December right through to about March-April (I think? Maybe someone can correct me on release dates?). These releases from AMD and Nvidia are codenamed Southern Islands and Kepler, respectively.

While you might not want to buy one of those brand new (read: more expensive) cards, it will undoubtably shake up the current pricing structure on the cards that are out at the moment.

My own humble take on single vs multi card solutions is that if you want less hassle with driver updates/game profiles? Go a single card. If you want very high performance and get bang for your buck? Go xfire/SLI.

You also didn't mention what your power supply unit is. This will also have an effect on any recommendations we'll give regarding single vs multi card options

TychoCelchuuu

This is for MMOs, one video card is almost overkill. TOR aims to be able to run on a toaster.

Synthesis

TychoCelchuuu wrote:

This is for MMOs, one video card is almost overkill. TOR aims to be able to run on a toaster.

I'd agree. MMOs tend to aim towards the lowest common power denominator, for a reason. At the same time, if you wanted to run TOR on the highest settings, I have no idea what kind of power requirements that woudl entail. Right now, I'm running two GTX 470s, and the inconvenience is mostly limited to making minor adjustments periodically (not always the case--Nvidia's drivers have made a lot of headway in the last year), and it's wellt worth it in games like Shogun 2 at 1080p. The alternative--a single super-powerful video card with multiple chipsets on it--might not have fit into my case.

kaliyama

If all you want to do is run an MMO, wait for the next wave of cards to be released. As Tef said, they'll be coming out in the next few months and that will push prices of existing cards down. But if you're at 1920 go with a single card - the logic for getting two is that you get more VRAM, etc. for higher resolutions, but there's a lot more potential for things screwing up with an SLI/crossifre setup than with a single card.

Arcane1

I have a 900 watt

lowlylowlycook

kaliyama wrote:

If all you want to do is run an MMO, wait for the next wave of cards to be released. As Tef said, they'll be coming out in the next few months and that will push prices of existing cards down. But if you're at 1920 go with a single card - the logic for getting two is that you get more VRAM, etc. for higher resolutions, but there's a lot more potential for things screwing up with an SLI/crossifre setup than with a single card.

As far as I know this is exactly wrong. Two card setups need more total ram than an equivalent one card setup. That is if you want to replicate a card with twice the power you'll need two cards, each with the ram of the high end card.

In any case, the OP will want to check out this techreport article before going with a 2 GPU setup. In short they changes their benchmarking of video cards because the normal fps measurement greatly overstates the advantage of multiple GPUs.

aioua

Yeah I'm running dual 5850's right now and its.. okay. They're always a little bit wonky. I've actually had some games run better with one of the cards disabled! I really only got the cards as hand-me-downs from one of my friends.
Personally, I see crossfire/sli as a good option for when your card starts to be come dated. You buy a pimping single card when you build your machine, then several years later your card is just okay, but you can buy another one for 1/3 the price and bump your performance back up. Unless you wait too land and they don't make that card any more :P

kaliyama

deleted

Arcane1

Thank you for all of you advice, I found the article especially helpful. I am probably going to go with the biggest uber card I can get with my income tax when it comes in.

Djeet

Aioua wrote:

Personally, I see crossfire/sli as a good option for when your card starts to be come dated. You buy a pimping single card when you build your machine, then several years later your card is just okay, but you can buy another one for 1/3 the price and bump your performance back up. Unless you wait too land and they don't make that card any more :P

I'm wondering if anyone's actually done this and it be the economically sound decision. The last 2 iterations of graphics cards I've upgraded to I was thinking I'd do this, and 18 months down the line it's impossible to source the card at a reasonable price new (meaning that for the new cost I could just buy a single graphics card that would be as good or better than the SLI'ed performance of the old card, and likely at a lower power requirement). It seems to me that most people who do SLI/CF either do so from the start or luck into a card (cheap buy from a friend or a gift). Right now I'm sitting on a GTX 260 216 core, and it's hard to pull the trigger on a 2nd when I could get a GTX 560Ti or a 6950 for about the same. I did see a batch of refurb 216's on tigerdirect for $100 a couple months back, but they were sold as-is and had a lot of negative reviews with BFG not honoring the warranty (guess there wasn't any) on the refurbs so I passed (also, I was pretty sure I'd have to upgrade my PSU as well).

Anyone go CF/SLI after 1.5-2 years going a solo card want to weigh in?

TetraNitroCubane

Djeet wrote:

Aioua wrote:

Personally, I see crossfire/sli as a good option for when your card starts to be come dated. You buy a pimping single card when you build your machine, then several years later your card is just okay, but you can buy another one for 1/3 the price and bump your performance back up. Unless you wait too land and they don't make that card any more :P

I'm wondering if anyone's actually done this and it be the economically sound decision. The last 2 iterations of graphics cards I've upgraded to I was thinking I'd do this, and 18 months down the line it's impossible to source the card at a reasonable price new (meaning that for the new cost I could just buy a single graphics card that would be as good or better than the SLI'ed performance of the old card, and likely at a lower power requirement). It seems to me that most people who do SLI/CF either do so from the start or luck into a card (cheap buy from a friend or a gift). Right now I'm sitting on a GTX 260 216 core, and it's hard to pull the trigger on a 2nd when I could get a GTX 560Ti or a 6950 for about the same. I did see a batch of refurb 216's on tigerdirect for $100 a couple months back, but they were sold as-is and had a lot of negative reviews with BFG not honoring the warranty (guess there wasn't any) on the refurbs so I passed (also, I was pretty sure I'd have to upgrade my PSU as well).

Anyone go CF/SLI after 1.5-2 years going a solo card want to weigh in?

In additional to all that, I really have to wonder if the inherent negatives of running two cards outweighs whatever minor cost savings you'll manage. Heat output must really go up when you're running two cards instead of one, and PSU stress has to go up as well. In addition, though I've never run SLI/CF myself, I'll say that when I lurk about nVidia and EVGA forums a large number of posts related to SLI-only bugs and crashes. It seems like what Aioua is saying is sort of common experience - Two cards might run pretty well, but they might also be wonky.

Synthesis

TetraNitroCubane wrote:

Djeet wrote:

Aioua wrote:

Personally, I see crossfire/sli as a good option for when your card starts to be come dated. You buy a pimping single card when you build your machine, then several years later your card is just okay, but you can buy another one for 1/3 the price and bump your performance back up. Unless you wait too land and they don't make that card any more :P

I'm wondering if anyone's actually done this and it be the economically sound decision. The last 2 iterations of graphics cards I've upgraded to I was thinking I'd do this, and 18 months down the line it's impossible to source the card at a reasonable price new (meaning that for the new cost I could just buy a single graphics card that would be as good or better than the SLI'ed performance of the old card, and likely at a lower power requirement). It seems to me that most people who do SLI/CF either do so from the start or luck into a card (cheap buy from a friend or a gift). Right now I'm sitting on a GTX 260 216 core, and it's hard to pull the trigger on a 2nd when I could get a GTX 560Ti or a 6950 for about the same. I did see a batch of refurb 216's on tigerdirect for $100 a couple months back, but they were sold as-is and had a lot of negative reviews with BFG not honoring the warranty (guess there wasn't any) on the refurbs so I passed (also, I was pretty sure I'd have to upgrade my PSU as well).

Anyone go CF/SLI after 1.5-2 years going a solo card want to weigh in?

In additional to all that, I really have to wonder if the inherent negatives of running two cards outweighs whatever minor cost savings you'll manage. Heat output must really go up when you're running two cards instead of one, and PSU stress has to go up as well. In addition, though I've never run SLI/CF myself, I'll say that when I lurk about nVidia and EVGA forums a large number of posts related to SLI-only bugs and crashes. It seems like what Aioua is saying is sort of common experience - Two cards might run pretty well, but they might also be wonky.

As already (kind of) mentioned, the PSU can be a gamble too--between the time you bought the first card, and any other hardware you added to the PC in the mean time, sticking in a second card may not work out as you planned. Assuming you predicted correctly in the first place, since you can't really buy two cards, see if they both work, then return one.

Well, I guess you could. Stay away from NewEgg.com, the restocking fees will kill you.

Mangaroo

Never go dual card, wait for a better single solution. ESPECIALLY when you don't have to run multi-gpu (single monitor). When it works it will be amazing but dual cards need profiles. No clue about Nvidia, but AMD will beg your patience especially if you are planning to keep the card for 2years +

Synthesis

Mangaroo wrote:

Never go dual card, wait for a better single solution. ESPECIALLY when you don't have to run multi-gpu (single monitor). When it works it will be amazing but dual cards need profiles. No clue about Nvidia, but AMD will beg your patience especially if you are planning to keep the card for 2years +

EVGA regularly puts out their own patches to further modify Nvidia's dual-card profiles. I absolutely recommend downloading them when they come out--you'll get some excellent performance boosts in games like Arma 2, with one or two cards.

Really, all in all, I've been rather pleased with the support I've gotten for SLI...it's overwhelming for newer applications, but the fact is, those are the ones that are going to actually need the power of both cards 98% of the time to start with, if not more.

It's sad that AMD is falling behind....I guess I was hoping that AMD taking over from ATi would improve driver and software support, apparently not? Of course, until not long ago, you couldn't even do multiple monitors AND SLI at the same time on Nvidia.

Mangaroo

I'm tempted to switch but I've been with AMD so long. I've been sticking with the 4870x2, waiting for the nanometers to drop. Hopefully won't do too bad with a (second/third..fourth? generation) single solution from AMD

Synthesis

I only switched from ATi a few years back (before it was just AMD), to EVGA--at the risk of sounding like a broken record, EVGA was the one brand that met my expectations and exceeded them.

On a more basic level, the current Catalyst Control Center still leaves something to be desired (my dad uses an ATI card right before AMD took over the show, and I update it for him). Nvidia drivers also have their own problem (like removing profile, which can only be done through another program, gah), but they're less severe. Of course, that's because I've gotten used to them.