sli or no

[goodoneian]

so i've been looking at graphics cards, and i'm intrigued by the 9800 GX2. it seems like a good performer, but i'm not to fond of it's price, and i have read that it's basically 2 8800 GT's. i was wondering though would i have better performance with one 9800 GX2 or 2 9800 GTX's? 2 GTX's are basically the same price as one GX2, so it made me wonder what would be more worth the money.

 

[hermeslyre]

Consider the 8800gts 512mb, over the 9800gtx. They are practically the same card but the latter is slightly overclocked. You can get two of these for about $100 less than a GX2, so I would go with that.

 

[jsimon]

I was actually thinking about the same thing, between the 9800GTX Black Edition x2 and just 1 9800GX2.... on newegg the 2 9800GTXs are about 640$ and the 9800GX2 is about 540$...

 

[G25r8cer]

Getting the next higher card is always better than 2 of the lower cards! Plus, most games do NOT even take advantage of SLI. Therefor all that power would be useless unless your trying to show off 3dmark scores! lol

 

[hermeslyre]

Getting the next higher card is always better than 2 of the lower cards! Plus, most games do NOT even take advantage of SLI. Therefor all that power would be useless unless your trying to show off 3dmark scores! lol

The only problem being that the GX2 is essentially two SLI'd GPUs! It even delivers the standard unoptimized SLI performance.

 

[G25r8cer]

^^ Duh I knew that LOL Hopefully newer games come out with patches then! I was watching a vid on TigerDirect and they were comparing the GX2 versus the regular single GPU and the differences were not that much except one game they tested was more capable of the sli. I forgot what game though.

 

[Timo]

It depends on which drives you take, if you enable SLI and which card(s) you pick. The 9600GT happen to have an average 80% boost. Which is great actually. 9800GX2 are basically two even lower clocked 8800GTS G92's, better you just get an Nvidia chipset and two 8800GTS G92's then.

 

[goodoneian]

well i have an evga 780i, and price isn't too big of a deal really. if i were to buy two 9800 gtx's or whatever i choose they'd be a couple weeks apart. so basically what you guys are saying is that i'd be better off with two 8800's though?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814130335

what about 2 of those cards? under 500 for sli is a pretty good deal to me

or this http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814130325

since its a G92 gts

 

[goodoneian]

i pretty much just want the best performance i can get short of spending over $1000 for two GX2's

 

[hermeslyre]

The 8800gts is the better of those two, by 10-15%. Getting the 9800gtx SLI or GX2 might net you the best configuration, a couple extra single digit percentages worth of performance, but it's hardly worth it considering the price, like said.

You seem to have a hefty budget, you might want to wait a couple weeks till Nvidia releases their new GT200 cards. They're supposedly killer. Or get an EVGA and step-up..

 

[goodoneian]

The 8800gts is the better of those two, by 10-15%. Getting the 9800gtx SLI or GX2 might net you the best configuration, a couple extra single digit percentages worth of performance, but it's hardly worth it considering the price, like said.

You seem to have a hefty budget, you might want to wait a couple weeks till Nvidia releases their new GT200 cards. They're supposedly killer. Or get an EVGA and step-up..

yeah, i think whatever i end up getting i'll step up to the GT200 in a month or two since the step up program seems pretty good from what i hear. i planned on going with EVGA anyways