3gb or 6gb 280x for triple monitors?

[ThatOneGuyThatOnlyPlaysPC]

For Christmas I think I'm going to get myself two more 23" monitors to do a triple monitor setup.I'm wondering if I should get either the 3gb Sapphire 280x toxic or the MSI 280x 6gb twin frozr card? I think that going with a 280x will be better than a 770 for the games I play and the fact that I don't use any of the Nvidia features like shadowplay or GeForce experience, except for upgrading drivers, and I do stream and record using OBS so would the extra VRAM help in this case? Anyways I need to know if should buy the toxic for $350 or just she'll out the extra $30 for the MSI card? My max budget is $380 BTW.

[H4X3R]

http://pcpartpicker.com/part/gigabyte-video-card-gvr929wf34gd

[Sauron]

The 6gb version is only (kind of) worth it if you plan on doing crossfire, otherwise it's pretty useless. A single 280x won't have enough power to run a game that uses all that vram on 3 monitors.

[Lays]

A single 280x would struggle to use 3gb of vram with playable framerates, let alone a 6gb.

 

 

Just save money and get a 3gb, or buy an r9 290.

[VintageCake]

You know, an r9 290 would be pretty nice in this situation.

[Lays]

The 6gb version is only (kind of) worth it if you plan on doing crossfire, otherwise it's pretty useless. A single 280x won't have enough power to run a game that uses all that vram on 3 monitors.

 

 

If two 780's can barely make use of 3gb, 2 280x's won't do any better.  

[ThatOneGuyThatOnlyPlaysPC]

http://pcpartpicker.com/part/gigabyte-video-card-gvr929wf34gd

I heard that gigabyte 290's had cooling issues, is this true?

[Phoenix70]

I heard that gigabyte 290's had cooling issues, is this true?

get a sapphire tri-x then.

[Ac2000]

just get a evga 6gb super clocked aci all of the vram will be good for multi monitor setups

 

if u need anymore questions answering feel free to click the quote button or send me a pm

[SymphonyX7]

For Christmas I think I'm going to get myself two more 23" monitors to do a triple monitor setup.I'm wondering if I should get either the 3gb Sapphire 280x toxic or the MSI 280x 6gb twin frozr card? I think that going with a 280x will be better than a 770 for the games I play and the fact that I don't use any of the Nvidia features like shadowplay or GeForce experience, except for upgrading drivers, and I do stream and record using OBS so would the extra VRAM help in this case? Anyways I need to know if should buy the toxic for $350 or just she'll out the extra $30 for the MSI card? My max budget is $380 BTW.

Get an R9 290, preferably a Sapphire Tri-X for great cooling at a great price. I have friends who run triple 1080p monitors on the R9 290 with very good framerates on high settings. It's not ultra settings, but it's good enough. Less taxing games can actually run on ultra and still achieve 60 FPS.

Anyway, I noticed you have an Intel Core i5-3570K. For streaming using OBS, you should setup Intel QuickSync using Virtu. QuickSync offers virtually zero performance loss (unlike Shadowplay, which actually reduces performance by about 10%) and better image quality compared to ShadowPlay or any CPU-based encoder. Once you have Intel QuickSync setup, you just set it as the default encoder on OBS. If you don't want to use Virtu, you should check out this article/tutorial: https://mirillis.com/en/products/tutorials/action-tutorial-intel-quick-sync-setup_for_desktops.html

[seiny]

The power color R9 290 pcs+ also has a good cooler

[Sauron]

If two 780's can barely make use of 3gb, 2 280x's won't do any better.  

 

Actually you do use more than 3gb of ram in some games where 2 780s are enough, so in certain occasions it can be useful.

[Lays]

Actually you do use more than 3gb of ram in some games where 2 780s are enough, so in certain occasions it can be useful.

 

 

You can use it, doesn't mean you'll have playable FPS.

[Sauron]

You can use it, doesn't mean you'll have playable FPS.

 

Actually I think you can if you're using 4gb, but yeah, not with 6. Still, there isn't a 4gb 280x that I know of.

[Lays]

Actually I think you can if you're using 4gb, but yeah, not with 6. Still, there isn't a 4gb 280x that I know of.

 

 

It takes quad titan's to average 60 FPS while using 4gb of vram lol.

 

http://www.overclock.net/t/1415441/7680x1440-benchmarks-plus-2-3-4-way-sli-gk110-scaling

 

 

I had 780 SLI for nearly 8 months, everytime I was near 3gb, I had 25-40 fps, having more VRAM wouldn't fix that, it'd only make it worse if you exceed 3gb.

The GPU's themselves just aren't fast enough to keep up with that many textures being loaded

[rambi36]

The 280x won't be able to use all of the 6gb of vram so like what @SymphonyX7 said get an r9 290 they are so cheap these days it's not even funny .

[Thebman712]

You can use it, doesn't mean you'll have playable FPS.

dont cards max out vefore the reach the true vram limit, like if you used a 6gb card it should just let lose on the vram should it not

[DJHoro]

It takes quad titan's to average 60 FPS while using 4gb of vram lol.

 

http://www.overclock.net/t/1415441/7680x1440-benchmarks-plus-2-3-4-way-sli-gk110-scaling

 

 

I had 780 SLI for nearly 8 months, everytime I was near 3gb, I had 25-40 fps, having more VRAM wouldn't fix that, it'd only make it worse if you exceed 3gb.

The GPU's themselves just aren't fast enough to keep up with that many textures being loaded

I know we just had a small argument in another thread about vram but lemme just say I don't think you where getting frame drops because the card weren't fast enough to push over 3gb of vram. I think you had frame drops because the cards vram was maxing out.

[Lays]

I know we just had a small argument in another thread about vram but lemme just say I don't think you where getting frame drops because the card weren't fast enough to push over 3gb of vram. I think you had frame drops because the cards vram was maxing out.

 

 

It doesn't drop until the vram completely hits the limit, at which case you'd have 5-10 FPS, when I said 5760x1080 barely used 3gb, I mean that I hit the limit in crysis 3, completely maxed out at 5760x1080 with the highest AA. I had 5 fps because of the usage.  Turning down the AA one setting, it was back to ~30-40 fps rather than 5-10.

 

@Faa can go into more detail about the scientifics, he was talking about it in a thread the other day.