2 cards or 1

[colt1911]

I have a chance to pick up 2 XFX 8600gts for a great price of 210.00 or get a single 8800gts 320mb for 279.00 which do you think would be a better deal and what about performace ?

 

[The_Other_One]

http://www.gpureview.com/show_cards.php?card1=475&card2=512#

That's a tough call. I actually suspect the 8800GTS would be faster for the most part. The 8600's may have an edge in some games, but I also hear some games don't like SLI too much...

Personally, I'd probably go on and stick with a single card, but that pair would be quite tempting...

 

[colt1911]

Yeah I building a whole new setup and just don't want to bottleneck my system.
Mobo= Asus P5N32-E SLI nForce 680i SLI Socket 775 1333MHz DDR2-800 ATX Motherboard
Memory 4 gigs (Corsair TWIN2X2048-6400C4 2GB Kit DDR2-800 XMS2-6400 Xtreme Performance Memory
and either the Q6600 or E6850 when they go on sale July 22. Not too sure about cooling yet for cpu though.

 

[hermeslyre]

Especially At that price..

http://xtreview.com/review202.htm

In about half the benchies the SLI setup stick close to the lead, 5-7 fps in general, but the other half are disappointedly behind.. Actually coming to a halt in the NFS: Carbon bench.

Some of these issues could've been taken care of with new driver releases, but the possibility you'll end up playing Crysis with one card barely putting out it's own is frightening (to me). I'd spend the extra cash and go for the GTS.

 

[colt1911]

Thanks for the info thats what I'm leaning toward and it will also help with the heat issues.

 

[Geoff]

I would go with the one single card. Spec wise the SLI'd cards may be better, but in reality you dont get twice the performance with two cards. And this way you can buy another 8800GTS down the road.