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now this video is going to be a bit of a look at sli scaling on the gtx 550 ti

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now sli has been a big story for NVIDIA since they first released it with the

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6800 series however not every

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not every card necessarily makes sense to run an sli so

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i've always been of the mind that if there is

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a better card than the one that you have

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that is as good as two of the one that you have

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running in sli you're probably usually better off to go with the single more

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powerful card versus the two slower

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weaker cards running in sli so i wanted

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to take a quick snapshot of some directx 11 titles so the ones that i've gone

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with are hawks 2 lost planet 2 and metro 2033 and

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i compared 4 different scenarios so i compared a single gtx 550 ti cyclone 2

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so that is a slightly overclocked card i compared that running an sli with a

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gtx 550 ti reference card

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i compared a gtx 560 twin frozen two so

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once again this is a slightly overclocked card but since neither of

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these carry a price premium over the reference cards i see no reason to

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necessarily bench with reference cards and the last one that i included was the

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gtx 570. so the reason i've gone this

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route is that the cost of a single 550 ti

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is well significantly lower than anything

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else on the table however the cost of two of them together

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actually lands somewhere in between a 560

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and a 570 so that's why i wanted to test

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the single gpus that are available on either side of the price bracket of

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this dual GPU solution now the upgrading guys will say well yeah but what if i

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wanted to upgrade to one later then my response would be well then what you

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really should have done was saved a couple extra bucks to buy something else

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uh in the first place if you need more performance then buy something with more

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performance so here we go why don't we have a look at the benchmarks that i was able to run

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here and we'll start with hawks too so in hawks 2 you can see that the gtx 550

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ti at about 85 frames per second actually scales incredibly well in this

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particular game so that's like uh 90 percent scaling or so and

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actually performs right exactly where it's supposed to be in between the 560

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ti and the 570. however even this is an

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ideal scenario an ideal scenario has the 550 ti performing about where it should

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in terms of the pricing of this solution

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so you're going to see that the problem with sli is that it doesn't always scale

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in an ideal fashion so right here our 550 performs about where it should with

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respect to a 560 and even a 570 but the

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sli solution while costing more than a 560

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and consuming more power than a single 560 actually doesn't even perform as

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well and remember the 550 ti sli

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solution is about as expensive as in between these two so really it should be

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right in between them it should be around 50 FPS but it's uh it's about 10

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to 12 percent slower than that in lost planet 2. and now let's have a look at

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the last one that i ran here which is a metro 2033 benchmark so here i've got it

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running at normal quality with tessellation on and zero times

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anti-aliasing all of these benchmarks are at 1920x1200 by the way so you can

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see the 550 ti is right here 550 ti sli

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really doesn't scale that well compared to where it should be which is around 90

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FPS so once again we're looking at like a 20 performance delta

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difference between where it should be to justify the price versus where it

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is when it doesn't scale quite as well as

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it could so i basically the conclusion

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of this is that the 550 ti if you do buy

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one and you find yourself needing some more performance yes you can get

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additional performance and you can go from what i would consider basic

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playable to very very playable in a demanding game like metro 2033 at full

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hd resolution however if you know you need the performance

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you're going to be playing demanding games at hd resolution then just get a

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560 ti do yourself a favor and buy the right card in the first place because

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even though once in a while and this is sort of the

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exception not the rule the 550 ti sli

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setup will outperform a 560 ti you're gonna get a more consistent overall

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experience with a single more powerful card versus two

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more entry level cards running in tandem

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so thanks for checking out this video online as tech tips don't forget to

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subscribe and for more right for more unboxings

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