SLI or Custom Loop?

[iiNNeX]

Hey guys, I am in two minds about what to do and would if possible like some constructive criticism as to which option is better for me.

 

I am about to build a new gaming PC, my budget is £3000 including a new monitor (which alone is £700), so more realisticly £2300 or so on the tower.

 

This is what I have planned to get so far while keeping a grey/black and a bit of red as the main theme for the build.

 

Spec: http://uk.pcpartpicker.com/p/yL69Mp

 

I plan to game at 1440p and the monitor I am getting is 165hz, so ideally I'd like to be over 100fps in most games, and 165fps in the competitive games such as BF4, CSGO, COD BO3 ect...

 

So the build above comes to around £1700 or so I think so it is still a way away from  my budget limit. And this gives me two options, either do I ditch the EK AIO and the EVGA Hybrid and go for full custom loop (better performance while keeping single GPU), or do I get a second 980ti hybrid? Reason I am asking is because I had extremely bad luck with 2x 970s I had not too long ago, the stutter was beyond playable in some games, and of course their RAM limit actually being 3.5 and not the advertised 4 caused some modded games to run really slow (skyrim ect..).

 

Anyone had any experience with 980ti SLI that can shed some light? I've usually stuck to just buying the top single GPU every time and overclocking it, rather than SLI.

 

Thank you!

[TechGod]

Personally if you're thinking of a dual GPU setup...go with a Fury X crossfire. nvidia's scaling sucks. 

[Curufinwe_wins]

Personally if you're thinking of a dual GPU setup...go with a Fury X crossfire. nvidia's scaling sucks. 

That isn't actually true though. At the 10% better scaling of the Fury X, they are basically tied at stock speeds, and after overclocking the 980ti's walk away from it.

 

@op use pcpartpicker.com

 

Not that Firestrike is perfectly indicative of gaming. It isn't....

 

But here is the world record list for Fury X CF.

 

http://www.3dmark.com/search?_ga=1.70343444.565725990.1440134612#/?mode=advanced&url=/proxycon/ajax/search/gpu/fs/P/1038/500000?minScore=0&gpuName=AMD Radeon R9 Fury X

 

Here is my result I literally did in my first 5 minutes of getting my second 980ti up and running today.

 

http://www.3dmark.com/fs/6407033

 

My shitty results are within 4% of the world record for Fury X CF.

 

Here are the world record 980ti SLI

 

http://www.3dmark.com/search?_ga=1.70343444.565725990.1440134612#/?mode=basic&url=/proxycon/ajax/search/gpuname/fs/P/NVIDIA%20GeForce%20GTX%20980%20Ti&gpuName=NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti

 

36k vs 27700 (both under LN2)

[iiNNeX]

Personally if you're thinking of a dual GPU setup...go with a Fury X crossfire. nvidia's scaling sucks. 

 

Thank you for your reply, I did consider that a while back when the Fury came out, and when it showed that it scaled better at 1440p and 4K than nvidia (in some cases). However I will miss out on a lot of nvidia exclusive features and also my monitor, which is Gsync. So changing the cards isn't really an option at the moment.

 

I'm just wondering a 980ti heavily overclocked under custom loop is better investment for smoother gameplay than sli 980ti's

 

 

That isn't actually true though. At the 10% better scaling of the Fury X, they are basically tied at stock speeds, and after overclocking the 980ti's walk away from it.

 

@op use pcpartpicker.com

 

 

Hey there, I am not sure what you quite mean by use pcpartpicker? I mean yeah I used it to build up my system, but that is not what I am asking here haha.

[Jacktastic-Mofo]

Personally if you're thinking of a dual GPU setup...go with a Fury X crossfire. nvidia's scaling sucks. 

What? I don't think that' seven remotely true, NVIDIA gpu's scale very well and from SLI 980ti benchmarks I've seen that to be true, not only that but the 980ti blows the Fury X out of the water.

 

 

I'm just wondering a 980ti heavily overclocked under custom loop is better investment for smoother gameplay than sli 980ti's

 

Hey there, I am not sure what you quite mean by use pcpartpicker? I mean yeah I used it to build up my system, but that is not what I am asking here haha.

That other guy doesn't know what he's talking about, if you need the performance go with a second 980ti but if you want better cooling and quieter operating temps than go with the custom loop, personally I'd get a second 980ti.

[TechGod]

Thank you for your reply, I did consider that a while back when the Fury came out, and when it showed that it scaled better at 1440p and 4K than nvidia (in some cases). However I will miss out on a lot of nvidia exclusive features and also my monitor, which is Gsync. So changing the cards isn't really an option at the moment.

I'm just wondering a 980ti heavily overclocked under custom loop is better investment for smoother gameplay than sli 980ti's

.

Ah. I see. I think a heavily OCed card with a custom water loop running *should* be better but it's probs a pain to rip it out when you next upgrade.

[iiNNeX]

What? I don't think that' seven remotely true, NVIDIA gpu's scale very well and from SLI 980ti benchmarks I've seen that to be true, not only that but the 980ti blows the Fury X out of the water.

 

 

That other guy doesn't know what he's talking about, if you need the performance go with a second 980ti but if you want better cooling and quieter operating temps than go with the custom loop, personally I'd get a second 980ti.

 

Either way they will be pretty quiet as the 980ti hybrid's are known to not exceed 50C and you can't even hear the fan. Have you seen any complaints in regards to 980ti sli stutter at all?

 

I mean on old games where reaching such fps is already easy with a single card, i ll happily disable SLI for, to make sure i don't stutter but its for the more modern titles i am worried about (W3, GTA V, FO4)

[Jacktastic-Mofo]

Either way they will be pretty quiet as the 980ti hybrid's are known to not exceed 50C and you can't even hear the fan. Have you seen any complaints in regards to 980ti sli stutter at all?

 

I mean on old games where reaching such fps is already easy with a single card, i ll happily disable SLI for, to make sure i don't stutter but its for the more modern titles i am worried about (W3, GTA V, FO4)

As you can see I have SLI GTX 960's and I play the Witcher 3 and GTA 5 and have zero stuttering and I haven't heard of that from anyone using GTX 980ti's in SLI either. 

[Curufinwe_wins]

Thank you for your reply, I did consider that a while back when the Fury came out, and when it showed that it scaled better at 1440p and 4K than nvidia (in some cases). However I will miss out on a lot of nvidia exclusive features and also my monitor, which is Gsync. So changing the cards isn't really an option at the moment.

 

I'm just wondering a 980ti heavily overclocked under custom loop is better investment for smoother gameplay than sli 980ti's

 

 

 

 

Hey there, I am not sure what you quite mean by use pcpartpicker? I mean yeah I used it to build up my system, but that is not what I am asking here haha.

Smoother game-play will definitely be a second 980ti. Huge improvement.

 

I mean post the pcpartpicker link instead of the text list.

[TechGod]

What? I don't think that' seven remotely true, NVIDIA gpu's scale very well and from SLI 980ti benchmarks I've seen that to be true, not only that but the 980ti blows the Fury X out of the water.

That other guy doesn't know what he's talking about, if you need the performance go with a second 980ti but if you want better cooling and quieter operating temps than go with the custom loop, personally I'd get a second 980ti.

Now that's just being rude for no apparent reason. There were various benches where TWO FURY Xs beat TWO 980TIs. Of course a single Ti is better but that's not the argument.

[Jacktastic-Mofo]

Now that's just being rude for no apparent reason. There were various benches where TWO FURY Xs beat TWO 980TIs. Of course a single Ti is better but that's not the argument.

Can I have links to those benchmarks? I'm looking at some now and other than games where SLI is poorly optimized the GTX 980ti's are winning.

Note most major games have well optimized SLI support.

[iiNNeX]

Smoother game-play will definitely be a second 980ti. Huge improvement.

 

I mean post the pcpartpicker link instead of the text list.

 

Ah okay, thanks. Done that now

[TechGod]

Can I have links to those benchmarks? I'm looking at some now and other than games where SLI is poorly optimized the GTX 980ti's are winning.

Note most major games have well optimized SLI support.

http://www.pcper.com/reviews/Graphics-Cards/AMD-Fury-X-vs-NVIDIA-GTX-980-Ti-2-and-3-Way-Multi-GPU-Performance/Power-Consu

But what about that direct AMD and NVIDIA comparisons? Despite what we might have expected going in, the AMD Radeon R9 Fury X actually scaled in CrossFire better than the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti. This comes not only in terms of average frame rate increases, but also in lower frame time variances that result in a smoother gaming experience. In several cases the extra scalability demonstrated by the Fury X allowed its dual-GPU performance to surpass a pair of GTX 980 Ti cards even though in a single GPU configuration the GeForce card was the winner. GRID 2 at 4K is one example of this result as is Bioshock Infinite at 4K. And even in a game like Crysis 3 at 4K where we saw NVIDIA's card scale by a fantastic 84%, AMD's Fury X card scaled by 95%!

Now next time you be rude to someone, think about it long and hard. 

[Curufinwe_wins]

Ah okay, thanks. Done that now

Are you willing to overclock your cpu? Because if so, you should go x99 with that budget imho.

 

PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant

 

CPU: Intel Core i7-5820K 3.3GHz 6-Core Processor  (£289.99 @ Ebuyer) 

CPU Cooler: NZXT Kraken X61 106.1 CFM Liquid CPU Cooler  (£101.99 @ Novatech) 

Thermal Compound: Noctua NT-H1 3.5g Thermal Paste  (£8.47 @ Overclockers.co.uk) 

Motherboard: MSI X99A SLI PLUS ATX LGA2011-3 Motherboard  (£169.96 @ More Computers) 

Memory: Kingston HyperX Fury Black 16GB (4 x 4GB) DDR4-2400 Memory  (£83.77 @ More Computers) 

Storage: Samsung 850 EVO-Series 1TB 2.5" Solid State Drive  (£239.99 @ Aria PC) 

Storage: Western Digital BLACK SERIES 2TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive  (Purchased For £0.00) 

Storage: Western Digital BLACK SERIES 2TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive  (Purchased For £0.00) 

Video Card: EVGA GeForce GTX 980 Ti 6GB HYBRID Video Card (2-Way SLI)  (£599.99 @ Ebuyer) 

Video Card: EVGA GeForce GTX 980 Ti 6GB HYBRID Video Card (2-Way SLI)  (£599.99 @ Ebuyer) 

Case: Corsair 450D ATX Mid Tower Case  (£95.90 @ More Computers) 

Power Supply: EVGA 850W 80+ Gold Certified Fully-Modular ATX Power Supply  (£99.99 @ Dabs) 

Total: £2290.04

Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available

Generated by PCPartPicker 2015-11-06 03:48 GMT+0000

[iiNNeX]

 

Are you willing to overclock your cpu? Because if so, you should go x99 with that budget imho.

 

PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant

 

CPU: Intel Core i7-5820K 3.3GHz 6-Core Processor  (£289.99 @ Ebuyer) 

CPU Cooler: NZXT Kraken X61 106.1 CFM Liquid CPU Cooler  (£101.99 @ Novatech) 

Thermal Compound: Noctua NT-H1 3.5g Thermal Paste  (£8.47 @ Overclockers.co.uk) 

Motherboard: MSI X99A SLI PLUS ATX LGA2011-3 Motherboard  (£169.96 @ More Computers) 

Memory: Kingston HyperX Fury Black 16GB (4 x 4GB) DDR4-2400 Memory  (£83.77 @ More Computers) 

Storage: Samsung 850 EVO-Series 1TB 2.5" Solid State Drive  (£239.99 @ Aria PC) 

Storage: Western Digital BLACK SERIES 2TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive  (Purchased For £0.00) 

Storage: Western Digital BLACK SERIES 2TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive  (Purchased For £0.00) 

Video Card: EVGA GeForce GTX 980 Ti 6GB HYBRID Video Card (2-Way SLI)  (£599.99 @ Ebuyer) 

Video Card: EVGA GeForce GTX 980 Ti 6GB HYBRID Video Card (2-Way SLI)  (£599.99 @ Ebuyer) 

Case: Corsair 450D ATX Mid Tower Case  (£95.90 @ More Computers) 

Power Supply: EVGA 850W 80+ Gold Certified Fully-Modular ATX Power Supply  (£99.99 @ Dabs) 

Total: £2290.04

Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available

Generated by PCPartPicker 2015-11-06 03:48 GMT+0000

 

 

Yeah I will be overclocking everything as high as possible. I did consider X99 but it does come a tad more expensive with the parts i'd like to use: http://uk.pcpartpicker.com/p/wsRcXL

 

Also with DX12 games, the CPU will have less load as most instructions will be done on the GPU from the articles I've read, so multicore really won't benefit me. Another thing is the 5820k/5930k aren't guaranteed to always go 4.5ghz, mostly between 4-2 and 4-4 from recent bins, and are getting kind of old now, I imagine Skylake-E will be out in less than a year, so might potentially sell this build then and go for that if for some reason games start using more cores properly.

[Curufinwe_wins]

Yeah I will be overclocking everything as high as possible. I did consider X99 but it does come a tad more expensive with the parts i'd like to use: http://uk.pcpartpicker.com/p/wsRcXL

 

Also with DX12 games, the CPU will have less load as most instructions will be done on the GPU from the articles I've read, so multicore really won't benefit me. Another thing is the 5820k/5930k aren't guaranteed to always go 4.5ghz, mostly between 4-2 and 4-4 from recent bins, and are getting kind of old now, I imagine Skylake-E will be out in less than a year, so might potentially sell this build then and go for that if for some reason games start using more cores properly.

On Haswell-E speeds over 2400 DDR4 don't make a difference at all. 

http://www.anandtech.com/show/8959/ddr4-haswell-e-scaling-review-2133-to-3200-with-gskill-corsair-adata-and-crucial

 

As I have mentioned in another review, the EK aio is one of the worst price to performance products on the market today. You don't need it anyways.

 

I won't say that it's guarenteed to hit 4.5, but 99.9999% chance you can hit it under 1.35V now. (as time goes on the quality of overclocking available on chips improves). Furthermore you can see performance increases in numerous games already, and in SLI that increase will only become more evident (as sli has a decent amount of cpu overhead).

 

But that's just my two cents.

[iiNNeX]

On Haswell-E speeds over 2400 DDR4 don't make a difference at all. 

http://www.anandtech.com/show/8959/ddr4-haswell-e-scaling-review-2133-to-3200-with-gskill-corsair-adata-and-crucial

 

As I have mentioned in another review, the EK aio is one of the worst price to performance products on the market today. You don't need it anyways.

 

I won't say that it's guarenteed to hit 4.5, but 99.9999% chance you can hit it under 1.35V now. (as time goes on the quality of overclocking available on chips improves). Furthermore you can see performance increases in numerous games already, and in SLI that increase will only become more evident (as sli has a decent amount of cpu overhead).

 

But that's just my two cents.

 

Ah right, I see... Well I think you have a point there. And yeah I know about the RAM, I just love the look of those heat spreaders on the higher up variant

 

On the UK sites, the EK AIO has been rated very well, up there with Swiftech H220/H240X, so that's odd.

 

Will 5820k scale SLI better than the 20 PCI-E lane skylake?

[Curufinwe_wins]

Ah right, I see... Well I think you have a point there. And yeah I know about the RAM, I just love the look of those heat spreaders on the higher up variant

 

On the UK sites, the EK AIO has been rated very well, up there with Swiftech H220/H240X, so that's odd.

 

Will 5820k scale SLI better than the 20 PCI-E lane skylake?

Yes, it will scale better. Fair enough.

 

Well the EK is a high performance part yes. (it doesn't beat 280mm rads with aftermarket fans) But its cost is so high that it's price to performance is awful. I would recommend the x61 for 2/3 of the cost it's a marginal change in performance (if not an improvement).

 

BTW I'm running 4.5 @ 1.25V and I don't know a person who bought their 5820k in the last two or three months that couldn't hit 4.5 at 1.3V, but I don't know enough people with them to say I am 100% sure you will hit it.

[iiNNeX]

Yes, it will scale better. Fair enough.

 

Well the EK is a high performance part yes. (it doesn't beat 280mm rads with aftermarket fans) But its cost is so high that it's price to performance is awful. I would recommend the x61 for 2/3 of the cost it's a marginal change in performance (if not an improvement).

 

BTW I'm running 4.5 @ 1.25V and I don't know a person who bought their 5820k in the last two or three months that couldn't hit 4.5 at 1.3V, but I don't know enough people with them to say I am 100% sure you will hit it.

 

 

4.5 at 1.25 damn man that's good. See if I could get that, or even at 1.3 then I'd probably go X99, I mean the average 4.7ghz on 6700k isn't that much higher when you take into account the 2 extra cores, which I guess could help me when streaming on twitch. I used to have X61 but it had a noisy pump so I got it returned, on the other than it did cool better than my H100i GTX lol. What do you think about the Corsair H110i GTX? It's 280mm as well and I sort of like it's look a bit more than the Kraken (braided tubes and what not). Could put two noctua fans on it to keep noise levels down at higher RPM.

 

Also the SLI scaling shouldn't technically be different to skylake as both CPUs will run dual cards at x8/x8 unless you get a 5930k then x16/x16 will work. But from watching linus' video about x8 vs x16 it makes literally no real world difference.

[Curufinwe_wins]

4.5 at 1.25 damn man that's good. See if I could get that, or even at 1.3 then I'd probably go X99, I mean the average 4.7ghz on 6700k isn't that much higher when you take into account the 2 extra cores, which I guess could help me when streaming on twitch. I used to have X61 but it had a noisy pump so I got it returned, on the other than it did cool better than my H100i GTX lol. What do you think about the Corsair H110i GTX? It's 280mm as well and I sort of like it's look a bit more than the Kraken (braided tubes and what not). Could put two noctua fans on it to keep noise levels down at higher RPM.

It would work well (with the same fans they should preform identically in fact). I would recommend Fractal Venturi HP-14's though instead. Nearly as quiet while looking great and pushing more air (and cheaper).

 

Exactly.