SLI or save up for new GPU

[majsta]

OK guys so this is my dilemma, 

   I have a MSI GTX 770 2GB GAMING, and the card is great, but I have been thinking of upgrading lately and I settled for a GTX 1070. I am skipping a generation as I want the card to last me for a couple of years. But this is a a problem i my country as the pricing on the GTX 1070 is so high, the cheapest one is Gigabyte Mini GTX 1070 ~ 500+ Euro, and the ASUS Strix the one i want goes up to even 550, which is just insane. I have the money, don't get me wrong, but it is like half of my paycheck just for the GPU, and I just cant force myself into giving so much money, I am thinking about it but just... argh. Buying on ebay is not an option for me as only few sellers are shipping or the shipping costs are like 50 Euro, and the customs is 20% so the price is more than I would pay here. 
   The other option is to SLI my GTX 770 which i have a deal for 100 Euro used from a friend of mine, the same model MSI GTX 770 2GB GAMING, actually the both cards have been running in similar setups for same time, and it has not been worn out. And I am sure I can sell this GPU in a year for the same money, 100 Euro is still cheap for this GPU where I live. 
   So the question finally, would you guys go for the SLI or save up for the new GPU maybe the price goes down, (but that is highly unlikely)?

[vorticalbox]

I would always save up for a single card.

[yannick12]

save up 

[Crunken]

SLI isn't the most reliable thing, some games support it some don't, so it's always better to go with a better single one then SLI imo. 

[majsta]

8 minutes ago, majsta said:

OK guys so this is my dilemma, 

   I have a MSI GTX 770 2GB GAMING, and the card is great, but I have been thinking of upgrading lately and I settled for a GTX 1070. I am skipping a generation as I want the card to last me for a couple of years. But this is a a problem i my country as the pricing on the GTX 1070 is so high, the cheapest one is Gigabyte Mini GTX 1070 ~ 500+ Euro, and the ASUS Strix the one i want goes up to even 550, which is just insane. I have the money, don't get me wrong, but it is like half of my paycheck just for the GPU, and I just cant force myself into giving so much money, I am thinking about it but just... argh. Buying on ebay is not an option for me as only few sellers are shipping or the shipping costs are like 50 Euro, and the customs is 20% so the price is more than I would pay here. 
   The other option is to SLI my GTX 770 which i have a deal for 100 Euro used from a friend of mine, the same model MSI GTX 770 2GB GAMING, actually the both cards have been running in similar setups for same time, and it has not been worn out. And I am sure I can sell this GPU in a year for the same money, 100 Euro is still cheap for this GPU where I live. 
   So the question finally, would you guys go for the SLI or save up for the new GPU maybe the price goes down, (but that is highly unlikely)?

 I forgot to mention I am playing on 1080p and will not be upgrading to 1440p or 4K any time soon, so that also should be a factor as well.

[jhurst117]

1 minute ago, majsta said:

 I forgot to mention I am playing on 1080p and will not be upgrading to 1440p or 4K any time soon, so that also should be a factor as well.

2 gb of vram on 1080p is no where near enough anymore unless you like medium - low settings go for a 1070 sli wouldnt help the memory issue

[Morgan MLGman]

SLI is a decent option in some cases, but not in yours. Your card has 2GB of VRAM and it is not enough for 1080p anymore to max out textures which a 770SLI could allow to do in some games

[majsta]

Guys, I am not sure why you think the 2GB is not enough for 1080p... Hardware Unboxed had a nice comparison on AMD RX 460 2GB vs 4GB and it doesn't make any difference in most of the new titles. 

I hope LMG doesn't kick me out for linking this into the forum

[jjohnthedon1]

18 minutes ago, majsta said:

Guys, I am not sure why you think the 2GB is not enough for 1080p... Hardware Unboxed had a nice comparison on AMD RX 460 2GB vs 4GB and it doesn't make any difference in most of the new titles. 

I hope LMG doesn't kick me out for linking this into the forum

Na corse they won't lol

iblitterly had a post for other YouTube reviews better than Linus lol and people linked me to loads of stuff x

[scottyseng]

48 minutes ago, majsta said:

 I forgot to mention I am playing on 1080p and will not be upgrading to 1440p or 4K any time soon, so that also should be a factor as well.

I would save up. I did a build for my friend a few years ago with two 770 4GB, and assuming SLI works, they do work well. However, when compared to my 980 Ti, the experience is smoother even though the two 770s should be faster. Also, there's some games that lack SLI support, which makes the 2nd GPU do nothing at all. My friend's planning to get two 1080s to run 4KHD, but currently his setup feeds 1080p just fine. A single faster card is preferred though.

 

Hopefully by the time you save up, the 1070, 1060, and AMD 480 prices will have settled down (They're kind of high since they're not all in stock yet). I bought a used 980 Ti because it cost only $20 more than a 1060 at the time (1060 was overpriced due to lack of stock). I would recommend the 1070 though, as the 980 Ti sucks down power (Though more CUDA cores is better for my content creation work).

[majsta]

14 minutes ago, scottyseng said:

I would save up. I did a build for my friend a few years ago with two 770 4GB, and assuming SLI works, they do work well. However, when compared to my 980 Ti, the experience is smoother even though the two 770s should be faster. Also, there's some games that lack SLI support, which makes the 2nd GPU do nothing at all. My friend's planning to get two 1080s to run 4KHD, but currently his setup feeds 1080p just fine. A single faster card is preferred though.

 

Hopefully by the time you save up, the 1070, 1060, and AMD 480 prices will have settled down (They're kind of high since they're not all in stock yet). I bought a used 980 Ti because it cost only $20 more than a 1060 at the time (1060 was overpriced due to lack of stock). I would recommend the 1070 though, as the 980 Ti sucks down power (Though more CUDA cores is better for my content creation work).

I don't mind the extra power draw, I know I should but I just don't care at the moment. My PC is 24/7 on, always doing something, rendering at night (lite content creation), and gaming by day after I get back from work, content creating, or just watching movies or something. I would go for used GTX 980Ti also but they are nowhere to be found i my country. And the used ones if you do find them cost the same as new GTX 1070 so... the situation is bad, lets just put it that way. For example I found a GTX 980 no Ti just plain 980 and it was 300 euro... that's just insane (and average pay in my country is like 360 Euro, just to put the things into perspective)

[Mick Naughty]

Depends on the games. I had to upgrade from 2gbs when cod goat came out. Game ran like crap even with sli. Been on 6gig cards ever since. 

 

I I would upgrade, if you can take advantage of it. As in a higher frame rate monitor or you just don't want console graphics. 

[majsta]

I tested the GTX 770s in SLI this weekend. The results were surprising to say the least. in synthetic benchmarks the cards scales perfectly. I do realize that games are a different thing but I actually got more than double the performance (both FPS and finall score) both in Valley and Heaven benchmarks, which is crazy IMO. The actual score in Heaven was 5300 which is just slightly over GTX 1060 results, so that is the performance I am getting if I go for the SLI. Still going to think about what to do, I have until the end of the month. 

[Mick Naughty]

Yea my fps alway double in synthetic. 60-70% in games. It's always worth it for me. 

[majsta]

Just a quick update. I went with two GTX 770 in SLI, it is a cheaper option at the end and the performance is enough for 1080p. I know many of you said save up, but if I can turn the video cards in one year for maybe 250 EURO for the both of them it is worth a while. Thanks to all of you for the quick replays. 

[scottyseng]

38 minutes ago, majsta said:

Just a quick update. I went with two GTX 770 in SLI, it is a cheaper option at the end and the performance is enough for 1080p. I know many of you said save up, but if I can turn the video cards in one year for maybe 250 EURO for the both of them it is worth a while. Thanks to all of you for the quick replays. 

Curious, how is stability with the cards? Any random crashing?

[majsta]

3 minutes ago, scottyseng said:

Curious, how is stability with the cards? Any random crashing?

So far so good. Doug, when I first installed the cards one of them (the "new" one) wasn't recognized by windows so I had to go to device manager and update the drivers for the "new" hardware manually. After that I turned on the SLI in the config and restarted my PC, as it had some issues in windows. I ran the Heaven, Valley and Firestrike benchmarks. The second card is a little bit hotter than the first one but it stays at 80c without dropping back the boost clock, but it is to be expected, as it is heated by the first cards exhaust. I ran the benches for about half an hour and the temps were stable.
Games vise, I played only two so far:
- World of Tanks capped out at 120FPS at 1080p, with max settings, full AA and vsync off, but it is not a demanding game and it is well optimized so I guess it doesn't really show the performance.

- Armored Warfare (You can see I am a big fan of tank games) capped out 60FPS at 1080p, with ultra settings full AA, but I didn't test it further with vsync off so I cant say about max. 

Other games i could test is XCOM 2, maybe a little bit of Witcher 3, maybe some DOOM but I didn't get to do it so far. 

 

 

[smokefest]

Save upppp for pascal EZZZZZZ

[Morgan MLGman]

On 16.09.2016 at 11:05 AM, majsta said:

Guys, I am not sure why you think the 2GB is not enough for 1080p... Hardware Unboxed had a nice comparison on AMD RX 460 2GB vs 4GB and it doesn't make any difference in most of the new titles. 

I hope LMG doesn't kick me out for linking this into the forum

RX 460 is not fast enough to utilize full 4GB anyway. If you took my R9 290X and benchmarked it with 4GB and 2GB in games that take more than 2GB (aka almost every AAA title out there for the past two years) you'd really see a difference.

[majsta]

6 minutes ago, Morgan MLGman said:

RX 460 is not fast enough to utilize full 4GB anyway. If you took my R9 290X and benchmarked it with 4GB and 2GB in games that take more than 2GB (aka almost every AAA title out there for the past two years) you'd really see a difference.

I disagree and here is why. The amount of VRAM used in games is not affected by the speed of the GPU.

The amount of data that is stored in VRAM is dictated by the scene that is being rendered. So for heavy scenes (open world games, with lots of different textures) this data amount tends to be fairly huge. Still if the game is well optimized that data is compressed to take less space and if the game engine used to create the world is any good it will have smaller textures for rendering far away scene parts. In case of same games (e.g. any Batman PC game (trollface)), pore optimization can crush even the best video cards and CPU-s. 

Second thing to note is the bandwidth of the GPU. So even if the card doesn't have the texture it requires at the moment with high bandwidth on the card (e.g. 4096 on HBM memory on R9 nano card, and it only has 4GB) you still get the best performance in good games. And not to mention the pre-fetch of data that happens when playing games (e.g. playing platformers, a simple example, you can only go left or right so the next scene is the one to the left or the one to the right and you can get these scenes prepared before you need them) which further more decreases the ram needed as you can clear the unused data (previous scenes). And the fetch of the data is done by CPU from disk to RAM and then the card takes over from ram to VRAM. 
So my point being, while it is nice to have that extra VRAM it really depends on the game at the end. 

[Morgan MLGman]

3 hours ago, majsta said:

I disagree and here is why. The amount of VRAM used in games is not affected by the speed of the GPU.

The amount of data that is stored in VRAM is dictated by the scene that is being rendered. So for heavy scenes (open world games, with lots of different textures) this data amount tends to be fairly huge. Still if the game is well optimized that data is compressed to take less space and if the game engine used to create the world is any good it will have smaller textures for rendering far away scene parts. In case of same games (e.g. any Batman PC game (trollface)), pore optimization can crush even the best video cards and CPU-s. 

Second thing to note is the bandwidth of the GPU. So even if the card doesn't have the texture it requires at the moment with high bandwidth on the card (e.g. 4096 on HBM memory on R9 nano card, and it only has 4GB) you still get the best performance in good games. And not to mention the pre-fetch of data that happens when playing games (e.g. playing platformers, a simple example, you can only go left or right so the next scene is the one to the left or the one to the right and you can get these scenes prepared before you need them) which further more decreases the ram needed as you can clear the unused data (previous scenes). And the fetch of the data is done by CPU from disk to RAM and then the card takes over from ram to VRAM. 
So my point being, while it is nice to have that extra VRAM it really depends on the game at the end. 

This isn't my point. To run the game at 1080p at the settings that really push 4GB of VRAM to its limits you need a fast GPU. My R9 290X can max out any game at 1080p, 60FPS basically, but barely. Now imagine that a 460 is like 130% slower than my 290X...

[Joey1100]

Always, or like in 99.9% cases; Save up for a new one!
Sli doesnt work in all games, Power hungry and you will not get double performance. It doesnt scale up that well.

[Mick Naughty]

Scales just fine. Works in every game I play for the past 8 years. Power depends on the rig itself not the perameters. 100% scaling in bench marks if you're into that kinda thing. There isn't a string enough card to do what I want so sli will always be the only choice. 

[Reflecting]

You can also look at used cards like a 980ti if you want to stay on a budget. Other wise I would get a 10 series single solution...then later on add a second. Because...well just because lol

[System Error Message]

You should upgrade. 2GB of vram is your limitting factor.

 

If you ever plan to go with 2 GPUs in the future than you will need a GPU with double vram. That helps to scale with performance in the future as requirements increase if you ever plan on dual GPU. Dont look at the dual GPU support as a limiting factor as with the same GPUs theres driver support compared to app support. Some games may not scale but most games do.