Mid range SLI or High end?

[Malo]

A friend of mine is buying a new PC and is planning on going dual 7600GS 512Mb in an SLI setup on 2 x16 PCI-e slots. However, for the same price he could get a 7900GTO 512Mb or possibly a 7950GT 512Mb. I'm think that the SLI setup will perform better for mid resolution with AA etc, however the highend would have more raw power for some of the current and future shader intensive games.

The G71 has more than double the pixel fillrate, 4x texture fill rate, double the memory bandwidth and double the pixels/texture per clock, which is why I would go the single highend over the SLI as you would be relying on SLI compatibility otherwise.

So im wondering what you folks think would be the better way to go. Most likely running at higher resolutions (1600x1200ish).

 

[digitalwanderer]

Well if I was going the SLI route I'd definitely make it two 7600 GTs, the GSs make baby Jesus cry.

 

[BRiT]

Go high-end. It's a lot less hassles and headaches and is 100% compatible, unlike SLi or Crossfire. It'll also be easier to upgrade performance by having the option to toss in another card for high-end SLi should he want even more performance.

 

[Malo]

Well if I was going the SLI route I'd definitely make it two 7600 GTs, the GSs make baby Jesus cry.

Yeah the GDDR2 kinda sucks on those, about $20 difference between the 2 as well so worth the upgrade. Will definitely try to convince him to go for the high end, good call on the SLI upgrade later as well.

 

[Skrying]

Never buy into SLI unless you have the money to buy the two highest end cards. Its that simple.

SLI should have never come with the idea that you combine two lower end cards together. Its just a waste of money, because you could always run into compatibility issues which make the second card useless. You'll most likely hit certain bottlenecks in the card for other areas that keep the settings that you'd gain down, etc.

So in conclusion. Buy high end. You could probably grab an X1950 Pro, X1900XT 256MB, or 7950GT for that same price. I'd personally get the X1900XT 256MB, its the middle in price there and might actually be the best performer.

 

[Rolf N]

[x] single beefy card

What Skrying said, basically. SLI only makes sense as a means to get more performance than possible with the fastest available single-GPU solution.

 

[ANova]

Yup, single X1900 XT or 7900 GTX; sli would not be a good idea.

 

[nutball]

*delete*