How Will This SLI Perform?

Ownaholic

Ownaholic

New Member
Hey guys,

I just finished my first build about a week ago, and loving it so far.
However, I was expecting a little bit more power from my graphics card, and now I'm thinking about buying another one to SLI with.

My card is the Asus GTX 560 DCII

For reference, the rest of my specs are:
Intel Core i5 2500K @ 3.3 Ghz (not OCed, for I fear my stock fan is not strong enough)
8gb RAM
Asus P8P67 Rev 3.0 mobo
750w Corsair PSU with 62-max amps on the 12+ rail

From reading all the reviews on Newegg and other websites (I'd be buying from Amazon for various reasons), I thought that the GTX 560 would be overkill for a game like WoW; but in fact, I still cannot throw max settings.

I think my resolution has something to do with it though; I'm running on 1920x1080, and I cannot seem to completely max all the settings out. (Mainly the AA and Multisampling + Shadows; however I've turned down the view distances one notch as well)
Whenever I turn the view of the screen around, there is sometimes about a half-second of lag, as though it is still processing all of the information on the screen in order to display it. It's not a huge deal, but I want to be able to play all my games fluidly. This problem happens even with the settings lowered. It's still leaps-and-bounds better than my old laptop, but nonetheless, I was hoping for absolute max. (I've had no problems thus far running Half Life 2 on max everything)


Is this a problem with my setup, or just the simple fact that my resolution is too high for all of the settings to be maxed out?
My drivers are all already updated, but yet sometimes I will get a random screen flicker where the driver will stop working (it's only happened about twice now), and I'm unsure if this is relevant, but when I turn my computer on, it automatically shuts off, then turns back on again right away. It happens every time.

If I buy a second GTX 560 and SLI the two, do you think that would do it? How about for Crysis 2 and other games in that "graphics-league"?

Basically, is it worth the extra $200 for the extra performance?

Also, is my PSU strong enough to handle two GTX 560s? From what I've read on the internet, it is strong enough to handle two GTX 560 Ti's, so I'd imagine non-Ti's would work just as well.

Thanks a million!
 
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I could be wrong. But Asus just states it supports only Crossfire, not SLI. The P8P67 Pro/ Deluxe supports both.
 
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the 560ti should be able to do almost anything by itself, but for the money you'd prob be better off to selll that one on ebay, which you'll get alot for it, and then buy a single more powerful card or something, or you could also try to overclock your cpu and gpu and that might take care of your entire problem.

as for overclocking the cpu, the stock fan can prob get you close to an extra .5ghz, and a decent 30-50 buck one can prob get you the extra 1ghz
 
I actually figured out the problem; I needed to have Triple Buffering on, which completely fixed the screen tearing, and now I'm able to run it on Max everything. Hooray! =]

But SLI or Crossfire, I just meant whichever is the technical term for having two GTX 560's. And I was going to buy something more powerful, but I'm pretty happy with the GTX 560. According to videocardbenchmark.net; the difference between the Ti and the non-Ti is only about 300-400 points if I remember correctly, and I didn't want to spend an extra $50 for such a little increase in performance.

As far as overclocking goes, I did have my CPU overclocked according to the highest setting in the Asus EFI Bios, but I'm not sure what that clocked to; and I'm not entirely sure how to do a manual OC myself.
I'm a little worried about doing it myself, because even having it set to the "stock overclock", as I call it, I got an error about twice now, where it said the overclocking failed at startup, and I had to restart the computer. Is that common, or a sign of a problem?

I can overclock the GPU too, but I'm just a little unsure of how hard exactly I should push it. It came with SmartDoctor, but I have no idea which of the three settings available to tweak, and how high they should go.
 
That makes no sense. Why would an Intel motherboard be geared toward AMD graphics cards?

That's something the people on here failed to mention when they told me to upgrade my mobo to that one. <_<

Guess I'm stuck with it then, because nVidia is the only way to go for me, and I'm sure not buying another mobo all over again either. I guess in the future I could always buy one OP nvidia card to place my current one, like he suggested...
 
Ownaholic said:
That makes no sense. Why would an Intel motherboard be geared toward AMD graphics cards?.
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Why not? Intel didnt make the motherboard. Asus can decide if they want to support SLI or C/F or both.


Ownaholic said:
Guess I'm stuck with it then, because nVidia is the only way to go for me, and I'm sure not buying another mobo all over again either. I guess in the future I could always buy one OP nvidia card to place my current one, like he suggested...
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You could email Asus and ask, but on there site they only stated C/F for this model.
 
Whelp, at least you guys were able to catch that before I bought a second card.

I just figured that since more common than not, nVidia and Intel go hand-in-hand, as well as ATI and AMD. So I just assumed that the mobo would support nVidia before anything else. (In fact, I originally assumed that it supported BOTH, because I previously thought the term Crossfire was a general term used to describe having two graphics cards)

And since I managed to figure out the settings now, I guess I don't really even need a second one anyway. =]

Maybe I could spend the money elsewhere; like on 3D! (Or poor starving pandas in asia; or poor starving pandas in 3D!) Although, then I'd likely need to buy a new graphics card anyway, on top of the already-costly monitors and 3d vision required to use it.

While the topic is open, does anybody have any idea why my computer randomly shuts itself off and back on again every single time I turn it on? It's very brief, and only takes about two seconds, but it is still very strange to me.

Thanks!
 
Ownaholic said:
I just figured that since more common than not, nVidia and Intel go hand-in-hand, as well as ATI and AMD. So I just assumed that the mobo would support nVidia before anything else.
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Intel and AMD only compete in processors. Since Intel doesnt make video cards they dont really care which card you use. Motherboard manufactures are the ones that have to pay a license fee to AMD or Nvidia for it to support SLI or C/F or both.
 
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