Hello everyone, I'll change graphic card this week but could you help me to consider which is the best option to go? My current rig : Asus P8Z68-V GEN 3 I7-2600k @4.8 (water) 16 GO G-skill @2133 Crossfire X 7970 MSI Lightning @1150/1600 Playing 70% 1920*1080 and 30 % 5760*1080 What I would like to get : - Single 980 GTX - SLI 970 Now my main question : will my rig limit the SLI perf. because of my motherboard can only run the cards @ PCI-E 2.0 X8 / X8 ? Right now with the 7970 crossfired it was not an issue. I would like to keep my CPU which is a beast therefore, I can't use the PCI-E gen 3 .... Could you please help me make the best choice ? I sure would like to go to NVIDIA so, 295X2 isn't an option. Thanks in advance, Regards (*sry for my english.)
970SLI should run fine, most you'll see is probably 1-3fps difference per card so you wouldnt be at a lost. Price/performance is at 970 at around $320-$350 atm and 980 is priced at $560-$600 or at least here in the US so performance with 970 SLI will definitely be over 980 but like with any multi card configuration, you'll be faced with SLI drivers/compatibility etc.. you should know from your CFX configuration. Other than that the best solution would be 970SLI over one 980, especially if you're playing with higher res where the extra horsepower is needed.
Well I would rather go for one 980 if you can go for evga brand you won't have to struggle with sli compatibilty issues and it wil run smoother some games do not suport sli profiles you wil save yourself all the hassle so at the end of the day you wil enjoy games better
I am afraid that @5760*1080 PCI-E 2.0 *8 in SLI will reduce perf. I know perf loss is very little at 1920*1080p but can't seems to find any information for triple monitor.
When using triple monitors / 4K / very high resolutions, data exchange between the cards occurs over PCI Express. That's why 3-4 GPUs on triple monitors benefit from the highest possible PCI-E speeds. You might get a performance hit using PCI-E 2.0 x8, but I doubt it. At 5760x1080 60FPS, half of those frames are sent from card 2 to card 1. That's 5760 x 1080 pixels / frame * 3B/pixel * 30 frames / second = ~534MB/s. That's one lane's worth of PCI-E x2.0.