welcome to the Dual gtx980 versus Triple
gtx970 Showdown both of these Solutions
cost over ,000 for the video cards alone
and bring a monstrous amount of gaming horsepower to the table but only one can
be victorious today stay tuned for the stunning conclusion and also don't miss
our journey back to the parking lot where it all started for an outdoor
unboxing of the fantex enu evolve old school LT
style from December 13th to 20th 2014
you can save on select Intel CPUs KN and ssds with special holiday rebates from
select retailers click now to learn more now I often get misquoted as saying
that you shouldn't buy two graphics cards if there's a more powerful single
GPU option available but and we've talked a fair bit about SLI scaling
recently including in this video right here there is one exception to this rule
that almost always holds true the second
tier the one just under the flagship graphics card is usually based on the
same processing core is cut down in a way that doesn't affect performance too
dramatically it overclocks like mad and
is much less expensive so if you can
stretch your budget two of those sometimes doesn't cost much more than
one Flagship card because they don't carry that best of the best price
premium but lonus what if one top of the
line or even two second fiddle graphics cards just isn't enough GPU for me well
my first response to that would be why the heck not that's an awful lot of
video card power and my second response would be I'm just kidding I know you can
never have enough video card power especially if you want a game at 4K or
at very high frame rates I was just messing with you guys so let's take a
look at the contenders today NVIDIA's top-of-the-line Uber car dour is the
gtx980 it features a base clock of 1126 MHz a boost clock of 12116 MHz 4 gigs of
GPU memory clocked at 7 GHz and 248 Cuda
course sounds awesome right well it should because it costs over
$550 each to pick up one of these puppies and just over
$1,100 for the two of them that you'll need to take advantage of that Rog Swift
1440p 144hz monitor or that brand new 4k
60 HZ gaming monitor if you want to play the latest AAA titles but maybe there's
another way the gtx970 by comparison is
clocked at 1050 MHz on the core has a boost clock of 1178 MHz also features 4
gigs of GPU memory clocked at 7 GHz and has
1664 Cuda cor less than the GTX 980 but
it's not exactly a slouch either and it weighs in at only
$340 meaning that three of these would
actually cost less than two GTX 980s so
let's start with the raw FPS data here shall we across the board average frame
rates were really close between our two test configurations on our core i7 5960x
extreme Edition test platform Tomb Raider continues to be the poster child
for multi-GPU gaming with about a 20% performance Advantage at a 10% lower
cost for the three-way setup booya Far
Cry 3 and Crisis 3 tell a different story however both show solid results
for the Triple config if we just look at the charts but while sitting in front of
them at 1440p was fine so you high
refresh rate Gamers would be happy with this config at 4K the stuttering and
hitching was unbearable with three graphics cards and dual 980s delivered a
much smoother gaming experience the rest of our games dirt showdown Middle Earth
Shadow of Mordor and BioShock Infinite didn't have noticeable hitching or
stuttering but also didn't demonstrate the same performance Advantage as Tomb
Raider for our three-way configuration something I would have had to see if I
was going to recommend three-way SLI for folks who play more than just the games
that happen to run really really well on it especially when you consider that a
triple graphics card configuration has other dis advantages as well in-game
power consumption was actually closer than I expected probably because the
utilization of the third GPU is never going to be as much as the second which
is never as much as the first so this was basically a draw but both the
temperatures at which our cards were running and the experience of sitting
there next to them were a little bit uncomfortable for me our 970 rig was
much louder and especially the middle sandwich GPU ran much hotter than either
of our better space 980s and and that's with a fan blowing directly over top of
them not to mention that two cards will take up fewer of the available expansion
slots on your motherboard that you might like to use for PCI Express SSD sound
cards or other fancy new functionality for your system as it becomes available
so it's conclusion time for gaming I
just don't think the added bang for the buck of the three-way config of second
tier cards compensates whoops for the
disadvantages associated with this kind of a setup you could possibly make an
argument for it if you were planning to use your system for things other than
gaming like 3D rendering or cryptocurrency mining or something like
that but frankly even then the higher clock speed in additional Cuda cores of
the 980s means that unless the 970s are scaling nearly perfectly the performance
is going to be similar anyhow and by the time you're spending $1,000 on gpus
what's another hundred bucks to get a much more elegant solution solution so
that's all there is really to it this was a fun experiment but the conclusion
didn't shake the foundations of the pre-existing knowledge we had on the
topic it just gave us a clear understanding of what folks who want to
run at 2560 x440 144 Herz or 4K 60 HZ
need to power their setups speaking of
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