All these fire sales on high-end Nvidia video cards...

[Chalenge]

And so why would you buy a reduced 770, or 780 when you could have the 970 for the same price?

[guncrasher]

And so why would you buy a reduced 770, or 780 when you could have the 970 for the same price?

the 770's and 780's are being discontinued.   they will be cheaper.  when I got my first evga 465 they were going for about 360 bucks.  less than a year later I got my second one re manufactured for 100 bucks.

point is get your money's worth for the use you gonna get.


semp

[Chalenge]

Taking that a step further. . . why upgrade before the card burns out?

[guncrasher]

Taking that a step further. . . why upgrade before the card burns out?

exactly why would you buy the 970 when the 770 or the 780 can give you the same performance on the games we play for less money.



semp

[MrRiplEy[H]]

exactly why would you buy the 970 when the 770 or the 780 can give you the same performance on the games we play for less money.



semp

Don't ask him, he'll suggest SLI before you know it lol.

[guncrasher]

Don't ask him, he'll suggest SLI before you know it lol.

I am thinking of buying it so I can sli  .



semp

[Chalenge]

I wouldn't recommend it for AHII, but this new update may change that. I don't know what other games you play, but some of those I play even the 980 can't get to 60fps and therefore you want the most horsepower you can buy. What I do like about these new cards are the large memory frames, the new features not available on other cards (primarily VXGI), and the dynamic super resolution which appears to force anti-aliasing on games that don't include it. The multi-frame sampled anti-aliasing (MFAA) is something I really want to check out and I am very curious how this card will perform in games that allow super-sampling, which is a favorite texturing method of mine. Still waiting for the later process.

Some of these early reviews went up so fast you have to wonder. Just to be fair, I don't care if someone uses SLI, or not, but I will always try to give the most accurate information I can including all options. When someone reports (falsely) that SLI and Surround does not work with AH, then I will tell him he is wrong. That does not mean it is for everyone, because there are more factors in play and knowing the full details of a users system before you make a recommendation is something you absolutely must do.

[Gman]

The reason I tried SLI after first buying a single 680GTX back in late 2012 was due to Chalenge correctly giving me information about it working here in AH.  SKuzzy also chimed in, saying that although the profile was older, it DID exist, and did work.  Huge changes and increases in performance weren't as obvious in AH as in other games, and back then Skuzzy explained it pretty well, how the drivers, AH code, and SLI cards all worked together IN Ah.  Other programs like DCS, and many Steam related games like CS GO and piles of others benefited greatly from going SLI in my experience with the systems I built, but it could be a giant PITA at times, no doubt, and there are some games that don't use it at all, like Arena Commander/Star Citizen at the moment, where it hasn't been implemented properly yet (it sort of works, tons of bugs though).

[MrRiplEy[H]]

The reason I tried SLI after first buying a single 680GTX back in late 2012 was due to Chalenge correctly giving me information about it working here in AH.  SKuzzy also chimed in, saying that although the profile was older, it DID exist, and did work.  Huge changes and increases in performance weren't as obvious in AH as in other games, and back then Skuzzy explained it pretty well, how the drivers, AH code, and SLI cards all worked together IN Ah.  Other programs like DCS, and many Steam related games like CS GO and piles of others benefited greatly from going SLI in my experience with the systems I built, but it could be a giant PITA at times, no doubt, and there are some games that don't use it at all, like Arena Commander/Star Citizen at the moment, where it hasn't been implemented properly yet (it sort of works, tons of bugs though).

So to put your story short, you saw only marginal gains in AH while investing double the money to the cards. Extremely bad use of money to me.

[guncrasher]

So to put your story short, you saw only marginal gains in AH while investing double the money to the cards. Extremely bad use of money to me.

not sure you realize but a while ago the only way to have 3 screens was to sli.  now most video cards will allow to have 3 screens.  but then again it's like having an ssd, saving 15 seconds of boot time is an extremely bad use of money.  but yet you bought one just like I did.

having 2 vc's to play on 3 screen was a good investment.  saving 15 seconds of boot time each day is just a marginal gain for the 140 bucks i paid for the ssd.

it's just a matter of opinion ripley, you cant say the other is wrong without asking if it was worth it to him.

the same thing is happening with the new video cards.  the 770's and others are being discontinued which means they're gonna drop in price like crazy.  will the new vc be worth the money?  it's really up to each player to decide if it's a good return on the investment.  to me and I am being honest, I saw no improvement whatsoever over getting rid of my 465's and replacing them with a single 770 when I got my new monitor. 

semp

[MrRiplEy[H]]

not sure you realize but a while ago the only way to have 3 screens was to sli.  

Wrong. Matrox triplehead and AMD supported it just fine. Only Nvidia was ***-backwards on multi-monitor.

The SSD will benefit you every time you have to make a file copy, start an application etc. It makes a huge difference if you spend a lot of time on the computer doing other things than just gaming.

SLI benefits only a few AAA games as Skuzzy said, for most other games its just a gigantic waste of money. I would never recommend anyone to SLI their cards for AH. A single faster card is always the better option.

[Chalenge]

I would say the bang/buck ratio is really inflated with SSDs. The only benefit is how you perceive the system to be running, and really the difference between an SSD and a HDD installed under a UEFI MB is not that noticeable. When you add to that the fact that you don't really want to install any program that is going to be writing to the root drive repeatedly and you have a flop because the HDD will boot up just as fast. Of course, if you load the HDD down with lots of programs then it makes a bigger difference, but it also kills the SSD more quickly.

Also, what Gman said might have been indicating that AH doesn't need SLI with the cards that we have had for the last two years, while it is also more noticeable the difference that SLI makes on games like CS, F1, DCS, and so on. AH would not be alone there, because games like Tomb Raider see a negative impact under SLI (not a big negative, but negative). The difference at the time was me telling people you would see a 10-15% increase in FPS, and you saying it wouldn't work at all. The SLI scaling effect has greatly improved, yet you continue to say the same thing. Clearly, you just don't know.

[MrRiplEy[H]]

I would say the bang/buck ratio is really inflated with SSDs. The only benefit is how you perceive the system to be running, and really the difference between an SSD and a HDD installed under a UEFI MB is not that noticeable. When you add to that the fact that you don't really want to install any program that is going to be writing to the root drive repeatedly and you have a flop because the HDD will boot up just as fast. Of course, if you load the HDD down with lots of programs then it makes a bigger difference, but it also kills the SSD more quickly.

Also, what Gman said might have been indicating that AH doesn't need SLI with the cards that we have had for the last two years, while it is also more noticeable the difference that SLI makes on games like CS, F1, DCS, and so on. AH would not be alone there, because games like Tomb Raider see a negative impact under SLI (not a big negative, but negative). The difference at the time was me telling people you would see a 10-15% increase in FPS, and you saying it wouldn't work at all. The SLI scaling effect has greatly improved, yet you continue to say the same thing. Clearly, you just don't know.

LOL you're so far off. SSDs nowadays have much better endurance than HDDs You won't be able to kill one even if you try, by just writing stuff on it. They're rated for tens of gigabytes of writes a day, coincidentally the throughput of a regular HDD would not even enable you to write that much data per day.

If you think a SSD doesn't make a difference it means you haven't used one. It makes everything you do (except executing an already running application) faster.

The SLI is very poor return for money especially for someone who plans to play mostly AH. SLI scaling is horribly bad also on many other titles. For example Battlefield 3 that get a sizeable gain from SLI when using triple monitors, scale only a laughable poor 4% when used in a single full-hd monitor lol. So you pay 400 bucks to get a 4% increase in speed. Similar situation is with many other games when playing at lower resolutions and especially lower settings. The situation gets even worse with 3-way sli that gives only 14,5% gain on AVERAGE.

So if you play AAA titles and run a triple-head system, SLI can be worth while. I wouldn't use it on a single monitor system but upgrade the single card instead.

http://us.hardware.info/reviews/4632/33/geforce-gtx-700-series-sli-review-geforce-gtx-760770780-in-sli-and-3-way-sli-geforce-gtx-760---scaling

[Chalenge]

I have an SSD in the computer I am using right now, and a server running with one. I have tested them as the main drive, as a storage drive for immediate reinstalls, and as a page file drive. SSDs do not suck, but they are not worth the hype you give them. They fail as often as HDDs if not even more frequently. And it gets even worse in the SAS arena, where SSDs cost $30/GB. If I replaced every drive in my system today with SAS SSDs it would cost $960,000. No thanks.

I also have a socket 2011 computer with SLI and nearly 100 games installed on Steam, the vast majority of which benefit from SLI. Even your SLI review demonstrates that. TripleHead2Go sucks, because you quite often have to shut it down and restart right in the middle of a gaming session. Using SLI versus TH2Go comes down to one simple thing. Just like WHS versus a Linux box, you install it and it works. No configuration hassles, and no wife calling you to come fix the stupid TH2Go that keeps failing. It's not stable, and as future resolutions come in that means more headaches.

[MrRiplEy[H]]

I have an SSD in the computer I am using right now, and a server running with one. I have tested them as the main drive, as a storage drive for immediate reinstalls, and as a page file drive. SSDs do not suck, but they are not worth the hype you give them. They fail as often as HDDs if not even more frequently. And it gets even worse in the SAS arena, where SSDs cost $30/GB. If I replaced every drive in my system today with SAS SSDs it would cost $960,000. No thanks.

I also have a socket 2011 computer with SLI and nearly 100 games installed on Steam, the vast majority of which benefit from SLI. Even your SLI review demonstrates that. TripleHead2Go sucks, because you quite often have to shut it down and restart right in the middle of a gaming session. Using SLI versus TH2Go comes down to one simple thing. Just like WHS versus a Linux box, you install it and it works. No configuration hassles, and no wife calling you to come fix the stupid TH2Go that keeps failing. It's not stable, and as future resolutions come in that means more headaches.

Thats bs chalenge and you know it. SSDs are more durable today than hdds as they have no mechanical parts and they're provisioned to handle a few dead cells. My experience with SSDs has been totally the opposite to yours, perhaps because I've been using the state of the art models that shadow even the 'regular' sata ssd:s. You don't need to have a SAS ssd by the way, you can use a regular sata one instead.

Once you've used to having computers with SSDs installed, going back to a hdd model will make you gnaw your nails off while waiting for stuff to happen. I hate nothing more than wait time after I start a program or a function on a computer. Granted for a light user who maybe surfs the net or plays a couple games per day the difference won't be that big. But for someone who works at the computer it's a game changer.

Nobody was comparing triplehead2go with SLI, I just corrected semps wrong information about multi-monitor not being supported without a SLI. It is supported by other brands than Nvidia using single cards.

I would personally only invest to SLI if I already had the top model GPU available and that wouldn't be enough to run my games (but at that point I would seriously look in the mirror and doubt my sanity, other things go in front of games in my priorities). So far I haven't run into a situation where a single card wouldn't be enough. Actually I even play games through Wine on linux which drops the fps considerably compared to native windows. Perhaps when I buy the rift and I need to have a steady 75fps at full hd it may become an issue.