$1000 SLI Gaming Showdown - 3 GTX 970s vs 2 GTX 980s
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2015-05-07
·
1,494 words · ~7 min read
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welcome to the Dual gtx980 versus Triple
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gtx970 Showdown both of these Solutions
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cost over ,000 for the video cards alone
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and bring a monstrous amount of gaming horsepower to the table but only one can
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be victorious today stay tuned for the stunning conclusion and also don't miss
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our journey back to the parking lot where it all started for an outdoor
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unboxing of the fantex enu evolve old school LT
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style from December 13th to 20th 2014
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you can save on select Intel CPUs KN and ssds with special holiday rebates from
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select retailers click now to learn more now I often get misquoted as saying
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that you shouldn't buy two graphics cards if there's a more powerful single
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GPU option available but and we've talked a fair bit about SLI scaling
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recently including in this video right here there is one exception to this rule
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that almost always holds true the second
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tier the one just under the flagship graphics card is usually based on the
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same processing core is cut down in a way that doesn't affect performance too
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dramatically it overclocks like mad and
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is much less expensive so if you can
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stretch your budget two of those sometimes doesn't cost much more than
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one Flagship card because they don't carry that best of the best price
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premium but lonus what if one top of the
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line or even two second fiddle graphics cards just isn't enough GPU for me well
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my first response to that would be why the heck not that's an awful lot of
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video card power and my second response would be I'm just kidding I know you can
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never have enough video card power especially if you want a game at 4K or
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at very high frame rates I was just messing with you guys so let's take a
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look at the contenders today NVIDIA's top-of-the-line Uber car dour is the
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gtx980 it features a base clock of 1126 MHz a boost clock of 12116 MHz 4 gigs of
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GPU memory clocked at 7 GHz and 248 Cuda
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course sounds awesome right well it should because it costs over
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$550 each to pick up one of these puppies and just over
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$1,100 for the two of them that you'll need to take advantage of that Rog Swift
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1440p 144hz monitor or that brand new 4k
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60 HZ gaming monitor if you want to play the latest AAA titles but maybe there's
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another way the gtx970 by comparison is
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clocked at 1050 MHz on the core has a boost clock of 1178 MHz also features 4
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gigs of GPU memory clocked at 7 GHz and has
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1664 Cuda cor less than the GTX 980 but
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it's not exactly a slouch either and it weighs in at only
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$340 meaning that three of these would
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actually cost less than two GTX 980s so
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let's start with the raw FPS data here shall we across the board average frame
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rates were really close between our two test configurations on our core i7 5960x
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extreme Edition test platform Tomb Raider continues to be the poster child
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for multi-GPU gaming with about a 20% performance Advantage at a 10% lower
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cost for the three-way setup booya Far
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Cry 3 and Crisis 3 tell a different story however both show solid results
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for the Triple config if we just look at the charts but while sitting in front of
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them at 1440p was fine so you high
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refresh rate Gamers would be happy with this config at 4K the stuttering and
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hitching was unbearable with three graphics cards and dual 980s delivered a
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much smoother gaming experience the rest of our games dirt showdown Middle Earth
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Shadow of Mordor and BioShock Infinite didn't have noticeable hitching or
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stuttering but also didn't demonstrate the same performance Advantage as Tomb
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Raider for our three-way configuration something I would have had to see if I
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was going to recommend three-way SLI for folks who play more than just the games
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that happen to run really really well on it especially when you consider that a
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triple graphics card configuration has other dis advantages as well in-game
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power consumption was actually closer than I expected probably because the
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utilization of the third GPU is never going to be as much as the second which
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is never as much as the first so this was basically a draw but both the
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temperatures at which our cards were running and the experience of sitting
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there next to them were a little bit uncomfortable for me our 970 rig was
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much louder and especially the middle sandwich GPU ran much hotter than either
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of our better space 980s and and that's with a fan blowing directly over top of
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them not to mention that two cards will take up fewer of the available expansion
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slots on your motherboard that you might like to use for PCI Express SSD sound
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cards or other fancy new functionality for your system as it becomes available
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so it's conclusion time for gaming I
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just don't think the added bang for the buck of the three-way config of second
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tier cards compensates whoops for the
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disadvantages associated with this kind of a setup you could possibly make an
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argument for it if you were planning to use your system for things other than
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gaming like 3D rendering or cryptocurrency mining or something like
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that but frankly even then the higher clock speed in additional Cuda cores of
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the 980s means that unless the 970s are scaling nearly perfectly the performance
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is going to be similar anyhow and by the time you're spending $1,000 on gpus
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what's another hundred bucks to get a much more elegant solution solution so
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that's all there is really to it this was a fun experiment but the conclusion
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didn't shake the foundations of the pre-existing knowledge we had on the
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topic it just gave us a clear understanding of what folks who want to
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run at 2560 x440 144 Herz or 4K 60 HZ
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need to power their setups speaking of
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pretty much it guys like the video if you liked it dislike it if you disliked it leave a comment if your feelings are
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so we got a small Kickback whenever you buy new graphics cards or whatever else the case may be thanks again for
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