Upgrade? Very little data on.

[SPolite]

While I know that many would say just spend the money on a single card, when you look at possible cost to performance on a budget...there's just not enough evidence to make a counter argument. So, is it worth it?

 

I ask this question. 

 

If running an x99 mother board with a 40 PCIe express lanes cpu that gives you two of the PCIe ports at x16 speed and currently running a single GTX1070 is it worth buying another one used and putting in SLI? 

 

Try searching on youtube for anyone who does a comparison of the GTX 1070 in SLI vs say the RTX 2080 or 2080ti, there's not many. BUT, if you look, there are one or two.

 

To do a full system upgrade would be hundreds, and at the time of release buying two new 1070s wouldn't make it worth it. But, on eBay today you can find a standard used 1070 around $200. So, would it make sense to spend about $200 on another 1070 and $30 to $40 for the SLI bridge and buy some more time or not spend the money and save longer.

 

See attached comparison video of GTX 1070 in SLI vs RTX 2080ti, seems like since the improvements in SLI support spending $200 would get me close to the performance of a 2080ti for a fraction of the price (of course without raytracing and on only optimized titles). Why don't more youtube creators work on these possible upgrade combinations and show comparable benchmarks to give guidance for those on a budget who need options and already have systems?

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KwEn5IVv2ws

 

 

[boggy77]

it's down to what use case you have. some games scale well for sli, some not at all.

[mariushm]

Fewer and fewer games will support SLI.

Even fewer games support using multiple gpus, without them being explicitly connected in Crossfire or SLI. In theory DX 12 should add support for this, in practice it's basically too complicated to implement and develop only to be used by too few people.

SLI should work even with 8 pci-e lanes, so in theory even with 16 pci-e lanes, you'd be able to use 2 cards in SLI as long as the motherboard has support to split those 16 pci-e lanes into 2 x8 slots.  A card like GTX 1060 or GTX 1080 doesn't saturate a pci-e x16 slot, it won't be affected (much) by being forced to run in pci-e x8 mode.

I personally think it would be a bad move to buy a second card. You'll get some performance increase in SOME games, but most games won't work better.

 

[Zando_]

Similar to what @mariushm said. SLI support isn't as big any more, you either get poor scaling, or some new games don't support dual GPUs at all. Any older titles that supported SLI still do though, and like... Battlefield V scales well, IDK about any other more recent AAA titles. 

SLI is worth it if you already have the best card (aka, a 980 Ti and don't wanna jump to Pascal or Turing, or a 1080/2080 Ti for those respective generations), ooor you really wanna have dual cards for funsies/aesthetics, and a single card already runs your games fine. Then if SLI does scale and perform well it's a plus, if not then you aren't losing performance. 

If you're not down to fuck with it or want a guaranteed higher than 1070 performance, you'd be better off selling the 1070 you have now and putting that money towards something like a used 1080 Ti or 2070 Super, either of which would be a noticeable upgrade. 

Also on the rest of the rig side, what are you running CPU-wise? I don't know of an i7 on X99 that won't keep up with modern CPUs once it has a decent OC. I personally run a 5960X at 4.7GHz (tis a j-bin, most non-j bins don't clock this high AFAIK) in the main rig, and have a 5820K in my secondary that I usually run at 4.2-4.5Ghz. Both keep up quite well, they've got a similar IPC to Zen/Zen+ chips while clocking higher so they're still a bit faster. 

[SPolite]

Running a 5930k at 4.4. I had thought about the 5820k but it only has 28 PCIe lanes and my motherboard says 28 lanes or less cpu will drop the possible PCIE slots down to only 1 to x16, and at the time I wanted room for upgrading. 

 

Right now I've only been playing GTA5 (modded), RDR2, BL3, and waiting for cyber punk 2077. I've seen some benchmarks with the 1070 in sli on GTA5 and RDR2 and they show improvements but I was just really hoping to find someone that could give me first hand experience on if it would be a reasonable investment and put off having to spend tons of money too soon.

[BTGbullseye]

48 minutes ago, SPolite said:

Running a 5930k at 4.4. I had thought about the 5820k but it only has 28 PCIe lanes and my motherboard says 28 lanes or less cpu will drop the possible PCIE slots down to only 1 to x16, and at the time I wanted room for upgrading. 

 

Right now I've only been playing GTA5 (modded), RDR2, BL3, and waiting for cyber punk 2077. I've seen some benchmarks with the 1070 in sli on GTA5 and RDR2 and they show improvements but I was just really hoping to find someone that could give me first hand experience on if it would be a reasonable investment and put off having to spend tons of money too soon.

It really is a waste of money to spend that much money to slightly improve performance on 2 of the few games that actually support SLI. (the vast majority don't, and future games won't either)