Which Two Cards to SLI?

[Captain Bad]

Hello all... I've been looking at cards lately especially with Chaud's monthly setup being posted today... and I was wondering if SLI was an option...

What is the best way to approach SLI in terms of cost:benefit ratio?

I feel like spending $400 on 2 GTX 660s is far more reasonable to get amazing performance as opposed to shelling out for a single GTX 780 or something of that nature? That seems like it's too good to be true... and if that's the case, is anyone willing to educate me on SLI?

Thanks all!

[Killora]

The 650 TI boost and 660 both have excellent crossfire scaling and either will serve you well in SLI. and since SLI frametime is lower than ever and runts are non-existent, i'm beginning to wonder if you'd be better off buying like a 660/650 TI boost SLI config vs a 670 or 680. Which accord to benchmarks, loses to the SLI config.

Tradeoff is, not all games support SLI properly or just don't scale as well. But that's mostly attributed to older games, which can be played on a single card easily.

It won't be better than a single 780, but given that's a $600 card that's a rough comparison.

[Novx]

Hello all... I've been looking at cards lately especially with Chaud's monthly setup being posted today... and I was wondering if SLI was an option...

What is the best way to approach SLI in terms of cost:benefit ratio?

I feel like spending $400 on 2 GTX 660s is far more reasonable to get amazing performance as opposed to shelling out for a single GTX 780 or something of that nature? That seems like it's too good to be true... and if that's the case, is anyone willing to educate me on SLI?

Thanks all!

Keep in mind that if you buy 2 GTX 660's you are going to be stuck with them. If you get a 780 you do have the option to get another 780 somewhere down the line and run those in SLI.

[vesseblah]

Don't plan for SLI/Crossfire using two low end cards. You get all the downsides (heat, noise, unsupported games, electricity use) without any of the real upsides of having high end graphics compared to single expensive card. Also two low end cards have nearly zero resale value but in year or two you can still get half of your money back from single $500 card when upgrading to next generation.