SLi is fail. need a single card.

[Rollo]

You're loaded and more likely than not actually like tinkering your system to get it to work, rather than it just working properly in the first place.
THE OP is fed up with messing arount trying to get it to work and also isn't loaded. Ergo Crossfire and SLI are a waste of time and money.

TBH I haven't really had to tinker much with SLi. The big games usually pretty much launch with profiles or they're in the drivers right away.

The most problems I've had were when Vista launched, or when I was using Quad SLi when it was first developed. By and large, early months on Vista notwithstanding, 2 way SLi has been very hands off. With my GTX295s I never touch anything.

CF has had more compatibility issues, and you still have to wait for profiles on some games or hack around with them because ATi chooses fewer games to invest dev relations into, but they are much better now than years gone by.

In any case, the money in question here has already been spent. He has a far better rig than any single GPU set except a 5870, and it's too close to call there. A 5850 would be a big step down.

[tehguy]

Two upgrades ago, I was running an E6750, with Geforce 8800GTS 320mb superclocked (cost me £200 at the time, was one of the best cards on the market). It owned, but I didn't upgrade for like 2 years and with newer games etc its age started to show. Then I bought a friends card (identical) and SLI'd them up, was better but not by much. Recently swapped them both out in favour of a single ATI HD4890 XT, which destroys them hands down.

[Rollo]

Two upgrades ago, I was running an E6750, with Geforce 8800GTS 320mb superclocked (cost me £200 at the time, was one of the best cards on the market). It owned, but I didn't upgrade for like 2 years and with newer games etc its age started to show. Then I bought a friends card (identical) and SLI'd them up, was better but not by much. Recently swapped them both out in favour of a single ATI HD4890 XT, which destroys them hands down.

I don't get where you're going with this. The 8800GTS 320 was meant to be a "value/budget" alternative to the 8800GTX (much less RAM, lower clock speeds, less SPs) and the 4890XT launched 14 months later and was the flagship part for ATi until a few weeks ago.

So if your point is "mid range cards in multi GPU configs can't best ultra high end part released 14 mos later" I guess I agree, but the whole market had shifted to a much higher price/performance model in the interim to boot, so even that is somewhat debatable.

If you compare a couple GTX260 C216 to a HD5870 that launched almost a year later, the 260s will trade blows with it, giving you leading edge performance for the first year, and high end performance the second.