so this is going to be a quick follow-up video to my GTX 660ti content now you
can see here I've got two 660 Ti running I've got the MSI 660ti power Edition as
well as Galaxy's custom cooled GC card
now for those of you who don't know yes you can mix vendors in SLI yes you can
mix different clock speeds in SLI different pcbs in SLI I mean this one's
even running two six pin powers and this one's running a six and an eight
different coolers in SLI the thing that's important is that the GPU is the
same so that means you have to have a 660 Ti and a 660 Ti no 660 Ti and a you
know 670 or anything like that no flexibility on the NVIDIA side unlike
the AMD side breaker in a 6990 with the 6970 and trifire this doesn't work that
way so just cuz a 690 has the same GPU
as not that I think there's a 680 around
here somewhere but I'm not going to worry too much about it ah there it is right was hiding um as a 680 that
doesn't mean you can run them in SLI got to be matching gpus also it's been
suggested to me in the past that mismatched RAM configurations are okay
but I haven't tried it in a long time and the last time I tried it it didn't
work so there you go all right so we are
going to be doing like a value analysis because people ask me about this all the
time should I buy one powerful card or should I buy two less powerful cards and
run them in SLI so there are some trade-offs right off the bat two cards
is going to use more power period it's going to be noisier period because you
got more fans in this case you got four fans versus one but uh which isn't to
say necessarily that two of these fans is louder than one of these fans but
well whatever moving on um so yes power
noise both worse heat is worse for having multiple cards and in 90% of
cases multiple cards is bad never run
two of these instead of one more powerful one that is a low-end card well
well it's a gaming card but it's a low-end gaming card and you're definitely better off getting something
in the sort of more bang for the buck $250 to $350 range that's where you
usually find the best value so we're going to take two 660 Ti versus a single
680 and find out what delivers the best performance and the best value so here's
my first graph this is Crisis 2 1080p I'm using all my standard settings so
this is like ubered out with high reses textures and all that good stuff so you
can see the 660 Ti configuration actually well destroys the 680 however
it is more expensive it's about 20% more expensive and when we actually go ahead
and look at the performance differential it looks like the 660 Ti comes ahead so
it's about 26% faster and 20% more
expensive and at minimum FP if you measure minimum FPS it's about 20%
faster there as well so let's go ahead and you know what I'll do the graphs off
camera Battlefield 3 again was running at like uber settings 1080P and you can
see the 660ti again just destroys it in
terms of average FPS but the minimum FPS
was a little bit closer so it doesn't look like as compelling a value as as it
at first appears when you look at the averages however that still does show
that the 660ti does present a better or SLI does present a better value than a
single 680 in this particular title as long as you're willing to make those
trade-offs in terms of power consumption as well as
noise again running a game at 1080p with ultra high details and again we see at
that minimum FPS level a 20% improvement
from the 660 Ti SLI config over the 680
we see about a 47% Improvement in average FPS but it almost looks like
NVIDIA knew what they were doing when they were pricing out a single GTX 680
versus 660 Ti SLI because they're delivering pretty much the performance
that you'd expect for the Dual uh the
Dual GPU configuration versus the single one um you know what here I'll just do
this last one uh on okay no I won't do
this on camera I need two hands and there's Metro 2033 where we actually see
about a 30% Improvement in both minimum and average FPS so this is the clear
winner so what's neat about this cross-section of games is that these are all well they're all Shooters they're
all demanding uh which or two isn't a shooter actually they're all demanding
and they all demonstrate that the 660 Ti not only scales consistently in SLI but
presents a compelling value versus buying a single higher in GPU that is to
say that's not to say though that it's necessarily the better option because
two of these is 600 bucks one of these is 500 bucks and for that 20%
Improvement you are trading off extra heat and extra power consumption so it's
up to you personally I think SLI cards look more bling bling
and yeah I think that's probably all else that it's got going for it but uh
remember guys when you're trying to figure out if a dual GPU configuration
makes sense you just want to look at performance per dollar that's pretty
much the only Factor here because they've now got the same features they
both support 3+ 1 videos out even when you add another card if you're running
an SLI you can only plug the uh you can only plug in 3 plus one in SLI and this
one also supports 3+ one off of a single card um you also want to remember that
things like memory configurations are important so when you're running two
cards in SLI two 2 gig cards does not
equal 4 gigs of video memory okay so
they both have to share the frame buffer which means that you still only get
effectively two kicks so bear that in mind as well so I know this really
didn't have a clear-cut conclusion because basically performance per dollar
they're very very similar it just comes down down to do you want a little bit more performance or do you not want a
little bit more performance thanks for checking out this episode of L's Tech
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