GTX 670 SLI or?

[Bugs]

Hi there.

I already own 1 GTX 670 and I've been thinking about buying another one. The reason behind that is Battlefield 4 and other games to come. The thing is though, I would have to buy another motherboard, since mine dosent support SLI. I also have a 600 or 650W PSU, so I dont know if I would have to upgrade that as well?

Would it be cheaper and easier to save up for a more powerful GFX?

[Toffie]

Are you planning to play the game higher than 1080p? 670 + overclock should handle the game pretty easily at max settings.

[Bugs]

Are you planning to play the game higher than 1080p? 670 + overclock should handle the game pretty easily at max settings.

Right now, I'm playing in 1920x1200. I was thinking about OC'ing my GPU, but I read somewhere that it wouldnt be more than a 2-5% FPS increase. Is that right?

[Toffie]

Not at all, it could increase about 10 % + depending on which card you have and how high the core is running.
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/E...ture_2/30.html

[Bugs]

Oh thats quite a bit. My card is from Gigabyte. The one with 3 fans on it, but with 2 GB.

[Toffie]

Well you're in luck then, your card has great airflow and has very good overclocking.
You could probaly get a 15 % increase in BF3 by overclocking core/memory.

I take it you have knowledge of overclocking?

Incase you don't know.

Start by increasing power limit to 112 % and then slowly increasing core or memory by 25, but only one at a time so you know which may cause an instability. Just play for 30 min BF3 then increase by further 25 MHz. If you do end up crashing then lower the MHz by 15 and leave it at that.

[Bugs]

I tried to OC a little when I just got the card, but at that time, they wanted me to do fan curves and stuff like that. Should I do that again?

[Laize]

Hi there.

I already own 1 GTX 670 and I've been thinking about buying another one. The reason behind that is Battlefield 4 and other games to come. The thing is though, I would have to buy another motherboard, since mine dosent support SLI. I also have a 600 or 650W PSU, so I dont know if I would have to upgrade that as well?

Would it be cheaper and easier to save up for a more powerful GFX?

My friends and I are major power users. We frequently use each other as guinea pigs for new techniques or configurations to see whether they're worth the time investment (SSD: Yes, Raid: No, etc).

My friend and his brother both have SLI setups in their current rigs and the verdict is a unanimous "no" on it. Yes, you get higher framerates... in some games. In others, SLI just doesn't play nice. That doesn't even go into the pain in the ass setup process.

You're better off keeping a single card in almost all situations UNLESS you're looking at very low end cards that are dirt cheap. You seem to get more bang for your buck towards the lower end of the spectrum.

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Not at all, it could increase about 10 % + depending on which card you have and how high the core is running.
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/E...ture_2/30.html

10% is pretty generous dude... I've been doing this for years and unless you're talking about going from 100 to 110 frames (where the difference is unnoticeable) that 10% figure is a little dubious. If you dropped AA sampling you'd see a much MUCH bigger boost. Especially at the upper range of "useful" framerates (50-70).

With overclocking it's been my experience that the gains are very small while the risks are rather large. You have to crank your hardware to the upper end of its mechanical tolerances to see anything noticeable... and it's only really useful to extend the life span of equipment that's on its way out anyway. If I were to OC my rig right now I might... MIGHT get another 5 frames in Crysis 3. MIGHT.

[Toffie]

What risk? There is no voltage increasement with the 670 card.
10 % is the smallest you will see with a decent overclock.

http://www.overclock3d.net/reviews/g...king_review/16

Crysis 2 : From 42 average FPS to 70 average FPS.
The test speaks my mind.

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I tried to OC a little when I just got the card, but at that time, they wanted me to do fan curves and stuff like that. Should I do that again?

There is no need unless your card gets noisy or get over 80 c while gaming.

[Faithh]

10% is pretty generous dude... I've been doing this for years and unless you're talking about going from 100 to 110 frames (where the difference is unnoticeable) that 10% figure is a little dubious.

Not really 10%, could be even more. My 780 can push to 1300MHz on 1.2V (11mV lower than the max vcore limit) with 250MHz on memory; if I had samsung memory instead of Elpida I could have pushed a lot more on the memory. Taking unigine heaven as an example which is still very very gpu intensive; a 780 at stock clocks pushes 49.6fps as you can see here http://www.bjorn3d.com/wp-content/up...05/heaven1.jpg

My 780 easily gets 63.2 fps http://i.imgur.com/3uOQ3iz.png Making a 13.6 increase in fps which means an increase of 27%. As a 120Hz gamer I notice easily dips to 100 fps so it does make the difference for me clearly so having an additional 27% performance gain is awesome.

With overclocking it's been my experience that the gains are very small while the risks are rather large. You have to crank your hardware to the upper end of its mechanical tolerances to see anything noticeable... and it's only really useful to extend the life span of equipment that's on its way out anyway. If I were to OC my rig right now I might... MIGHT get another 5 frames in Crysis 3. MIGHT.

Then you're a bad overclocker :P There are no risks overclocking 600 series or 700 series due to the voltage limit, increasing your frequencies won't kill your card with default voltage. Many aftermarkt cards 600 series are running at 1.175V (max voltage) by default at stock clocks; don't have to explain anything more.

Also think you miss the point that gpu's are getting more cuda cores, the more cuda cores you have the better performance you gain with 100MHz. Eg 100MHz on 100 cuda cores gpu would yield a small 5% while 100MHz on a 30000 cuda cores would yield 35% orsomething. Because you overclocked a card from 5 years ago with poor performance gain doesn't even mean the newest cards from today would give the same crappy performance gain.

@Op Atm my 3930K@4.6GHz is bottlenecking my 780 in Battlefield 3 at 1080p, so buying a 2nd 670 is just going to be pointless really in your situation just for BF3 and in my situation a 2nd 780 would be literally a big 600$ waste. I'd say wait for BF4 and lets see if it's possible to push high-end gpu's or multiple gpu's to their max.
Also a few settings in BF3 (most likely will come again in bf4) are totally junk for a competive player so you shouldnt waste some performance on them. Anti-aliasing post softens the graphics a lot making it very annoying to see properly or motion blur.

A 600-650W psu should be fine for 2 670's.

[Bugs]

Thanks for all your great advices. I think that I'm gonna try and OC and see what happens. Putting the 2nd 670 on hold, and see whats what when BF4 comes out :>

[Danno]

I do enjoy my 670s in SLI. I run in 1440p and they still crush all games currently. With the new consoles coming out though, I am worried about games requiring a bit more than my 2GBs of VRam.

If I were you personally at your resolution, I'd overclock like people have suggested to squeeze as much as possible out of your card and then upgrade when Maxwell comes out.

[Shinzai]

I'm currently running a pair of overclocked 670s in sli, it can max out pretty much anything that is even mildly well optimised at 1920x1080 (maxed out as in 60fps+ constant, with 16xQCSAA, all features ultra/highest on all games and Physx options on high). Most games can run equally well at 2560x1440 also, but much newer games (Metro Last Light for example) tend to dip below 30 fps a little too often for my liking at that resolution.

Is it a worthwhile upgrade? Absolutely if you enjoy high end gaming and want decent future proofing. 670 sli clocks in higher than 780 single scores and costs notably less, given a lot of places are dumping 670 stock atm (got my second one for $240).