A couple of graphics cards?

[RobbieRoy]

Sorry if I'm being a bit of a noob asking this, but if you were to have a budget of, say, £275 would it ever be the case that two cheaper cards run together would provide better performance than a single more expensive card?

[vicar]

Depends on what you want to us it for.

Generally speaking one single card would be my preferred option.

Hope that helps.

[kalniel]

Sorry if I'm being a bit of a noob asking this, but if you were to have a budget of, say, £275 would it ever be the case that two cheaper cards run together would provide better performance than a single more expensive card?

Absolutely. Especially if you were to go second hand.

Whether you're OK with the trade offs (power/heat/noise and variable scalability) is another matter though.

[KeyboardDemon]

Absolutely. Especially if you were to go second hand.

Whether you're OK with the trade offs (power/heat/noise and variable scalability) is another matter though.

Two cards can and often do outperform a single more powerful card in some cases but not all. Factors such as how well the game supports two cards, driver issues, heat/temperature issues (as mentioned by kalniel), noise, power requirements etc... can also be important factors.

For £275 you could get two R9 270 cards or a single R9 280X, R9 285 or even an R9 290 card from the red team. If you prefer something from the Green corner then you could get a pair of GTX750Ti cards or for single cards you could get GTX 760, GTX 770 or if you can stretch another £25 then a GTX 780 might be a possiblity for you.

If it were my money I would be looking at a single card solution as suggested by vicar simply because this will just run straight out of the box and will produce more consistent results.

[kompukare]

If you prefer something from the Green corner then you could get a pair of GTX750Ti cards or for single cards you could get GTX 760, GTX 770 or if you can stretch another £25 then a GTX 780 might be a possiblity for you.

For some market segmentation reason, Nvidia don't allow the 750 to be SLI'ed AFAIK. And yes, I also don't think two low end cards are a good idea despite giving the appearance of being good value.

[RobbieRoy]

Thanks all (and congrats to you Keyboard Demon for reaching your 2,000th post with your contribution!).

Overall, it would seem, then, that the single card route will present the least issues.

This does make it occur to me that the choice of mobo for a decent gaming rig is more complex as it implies that development of dedicated twin card architecture is more style and less substance (the likes of the ASUS Z97-A, for instance, having 3 full-length x16 PCIe 3.0 slots where the top two are bifurcated by design to x8 when using two Nvidia or AMD graphics cards in tandem).

Or am I wrong?!

Cheers all

RR

[kalniel]

This does make it occur to me that the choice of mobo for a decent gaming rig is more complex as it implies that development of dedicated twin card architecture is more style and less substance (the likes of the ASUS Z97-A, for instance, having 3 full-length x16 PCIe 3.0 slots where the top two are bifurcated by design to x8 when using two Nvidia or AMD graphics cards in tandem).

Or am I wrong?!

All Z97 motherboards are like that - the CPU only has enough PCIe lanes for 1x16 or 2x8. This has no impact on performance however.

[KeyboardDemon]

For some market segmentation reason, Nvidia don't allow the 750 to be SLI'ed AFAIK. And yes, I also don't think two low end cards are a good idea despite giving the appearance of being good value.

Thanks, I didn't know about that.

Thanks all (and congrats to you Keyboard Demon for reaching your 2,000th post with your contribution!).

OMG, I didn't realise, at least it wasn't a spam post then. lol.

Overall, it would seem, then, that the single card route will present the least issues.

That's the way I see it, the only reason I would now go for a twin GPU set up is where I feel I must have more power and the most powerful single card available can't deliver this on its own, but even then I would prefer the single card and to set lower quality settings in order to get more performance out of the card.

[Revvvhead]

Buy the best single card you can.
Then in a year or two when you need to upgrade, you can pick up a cheap second card to SLi or crossfire then.

[dfour]

Buy the best single card you can.
Then in a year or two when you need to upgrade, you can pick up a cheap second card to SLi or crossfire then.

This ...

[camalbitboy]

I've run twin 8800GTs, 460GTXs, 560GTXs over the years. All have outperformed the flagship card of their generation and while they were running above 60 fps were brilliant bang for their buck.

What I did find though was that as they aged and met games that challenged them more if they started to drop below 60fps the micro stutter effect would start to be apparent in some games. Metro Last Light benchmark makes it very apparent for example (in SLI with 2 560gtxs every other frame takes twice as long to display as the first).

Its for this reason that this time round I'm saving up the extra money to get a single card. I really like SLI as a solution, but it is a budget solution that doesn't last as long as a more expensive single card.

[KeyboardDemon]

I've run twin 8800GTs, 460GTXs, 560GTXs over the years. All have outperformed the flagship card of their generation and while they were running above 60 fps were brilliant bang for their buck.

What I did find though was that as they aged and met games that challenged them more if they started to drop below 60fps the micro stutter effect would start to be apparent in some games. Metro Last Light benchmark makes it very apparent for example (in SLI with 2 560gtxs every other frame takes twice as long to display as the first).

Its for this reason that this time round I'm saving up the extra money to get a single card. I really like SLI as a solution, but it is a budget solution that doesn't last as long as a more expensive single card.

The micro stutter running two 6970s and even a single 6990 on this benchmark was crazy, it made it unwatchable in places, Using 2x GTX 580s in SLi wasn't as bad but it was still noticeable. I personally would never want to go back to that, the only reason I would now run two cards in SLi or Crossfire is simply to see what I would score in a benchmark test, and even though I have two rigs with identical cards I can't be bothered enough to do this, on a single GTX780Ti I get around 10,400 points (11,499 points with CPU + GPU overclocked), using both cards together I would expect no more than a 7,500 to 8,500 point increase on 3d Mark Fire Strike.

[starkyller]

One Strong GPU is better and doesn't use so much power

[RazorBlitzz]

It is better to get the best single graphics card you can afford than to get two cards. There's no compatibility/scaling issues, less heat output & power consumption compared to dual card configurations.