Video card question

[berto9]

Hey guys, looking for a little bit of advice.

I'm looking into purchasing a video card quickly here, and sticking with the geforce series.

My question is, is it better to go after a nice card (680 or 690), or run two 670 in SLI.... I'm fairly new to this whole SLI setup, but from what I read, it looks like the way to go?

Any input is appreciated, thanks guys.

[Kipperriffic]

I think you should just go with a single card. If you're thinking 680 or above, that is really good - that'd be an overkill for me actually. I have an HD 6850 from the company "HIS" (released 2009?) and it has zero problems running any heavy tasks. When I say "heavy", it just includes video games running at maximum settings.
I thought about using two graphics cards but I think its just a waste of money.

As far as working with graphics software is concerned, I don't know how strong they need the graphics card to be; I've no experience. I also have no experience with overclocking.

If I had to recommend a card, I'd say go get a Raedon HD 6870 or 6970 from Memory Express. (or an nVidia equivalent). They'll be cheap and will have no problems.

[Raekwon]

Yeah from what I have seen one good card costs as much as two medium cards. They are almost equal in performance but with the one great card you have room to add a second in the future.

Here is a link that compares cards. http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/2...ance,2932.html

[PsYcNeT]

A 680 on it's own will give you overall better performance than 2x670 (and be about $250 cheaper, not including having to spend another $50 on a bigger PSU) simply because of one fact:

Not all games are SLI compatible, and even some that are don't use it to full effect.

SLI isn't an "input-power = performance" technology unfortunately.

EDIT: Also, be wary of the synthetic benchmarking shown above (3DMark11). While a good comparable, it should be used as one of many when comparing cards. Especially since it is optimized to properly use SLI/Crossfire.

[berto9]

Thanks for the replies,

I've decided to go with the GTX 680 FTW, should have it installed at some point today. (maybe get another one down the road at some point)

Again thanks for the help, it was appreciated fellas

[To Be Quite Honest]

Great cards, I just bought the same series as well and when you turn on Cuda my editing has been lightning fast. Loves me my cuda and the thousands of Cuda cores on my GPU that do the work for me.

I had a basic video card and quad core system and a project I worked on took 14 hours to render into a final product. With the new card and new intel 8 core i7 it went down to 1 hour and 45 mins. With Cuda turned on it was done in an hour.