Hi all, I am thinking of dropping my 280x/7970 crossfire and moving to one card. Probably the GTX 980. I know technically on certain games it will be a downgrade, but on others an upgrade. I play at 5040x1050 (3 x 1680x1050) I mainly play Wow, BF4, CS, few others. My main reason to drop a card is heat - or should I say heat/sound, theres plenty of headroom on cooling on my system and playing wow it doesn't break a sweat but in bf its way to loud. I am also not confident on my PSU with the crossfire, its a little lower on the wattage side than I would like, but upgrading a psu seems pointless for 150 watts (corsair 850 mod) So Question - is it worth taking the performance hit? My cf mix is clocked quite high due to being a toxxix 280x and a Matrix 7970, but I am looking at a heavily overclocked 980 to compensate. Edit - I also find ati drivers a pain, when im in wow for example with ie/video open I have display driver crashes, I find crossfire sometimes flakey even in BF for example, sometimes it just doesn't use the second card and I have to reboot to get it to work.
IMO go for it for the simple joy of not having to deal with multi-GPU and all the problems and incompatibilities that come with it. You can always sell the 280X's, they should still be worth something?
Why not grab 2 970`s? They oc high, low power consumption, cheap, run cool etc. Just a little more than 1 980 and will smoke your current cards and a 980.
The 970 / 980 will suffer somewhat at that resolution. Consider cards with a faster memory subsystem, such as the 780 / 780Ti / 290 / 290X or wait for newer cards from AMD and Nvidia. You'll lose a lot of performance going from 280X CF to a 970 / 980.
thanks for all the replies. I went for a Palit super jet stream GTX 980 in the end. Very happy with it. Have only tested with 3dmark, but 14k gpu score is only 2k less than the crossfire config. Bout 1k less overall. But most importantly its cool and 10 million times quieter, infact playing wow the fans barely activate. Wow doesn't suffer any frame rate loss, havnt tested bf4 yet
I did use it yes, cant say I ever really saw a major jump in fps, but I never really tested properly. Will have a test on bf at some point see what the comparison is.
Well, I can just say, I've got two friends, both running 7970 GHz Editions, they play BF4 with dx. I wonder if they'd get any significant performance gain with recent mantle updates. They tried it when it was available in BF4, but saw some problems, so they went back to dx.
