580 sli or newer card?

PaulyTheRed

New member
Would like opinions on which option is the better please. Should I get a second hand 580gtx for not too much money to run in sli, or spend a bit more and get a newer shinier card. Rig is only used for gaming and watching movies.
Cheers.
 
Depends on the games you play tbh, if they're all older or those f2p games then you can easily get away with 580s in SLI.

If you wanna play new AAA titles though, you'll definitely want to switch to a newer card that will probably be faster anyway. The new cards also have pretty much a minimum of 2GB VRAM from the mid-range up and you get all the power effiency, low-noise and lower temperatures of a single card solutions of the latest generations compared to a dual card set-up.
 
Nvidia do not support Fermi any more, so you would have to run older drivers. Some games will force you to install newer drivers, then you're going to have a bad time.

Not only that but it's Fermi, in SLI. So you may as well turn off your central heating.
 
I found 580 sli to be about comparable to a single 780 maybe 5% less ? if it were me, now, I'd say pickup something newer, they do put out some heat but it's not all bad. does depend on what you're playing though. If you're only playing stuff now that uses a single 580 and aren't likely to change that too much if the second 580 is really cheap, go for it.
 
You alternatively could sell the 580 and put that money towards a new card and help increase the budget a little bit. That's what I would do. Unless you play simple games like LoL or WoW then i don't even see a point in getting another 580, but if you play modern AAA games then it's probably best to get a new card.
 
Use whatever you have to to justify the upgrade, be it power, temps, convenience etc just get it done :D

You could always look at some second hand 290(x) GPUS if your open to AMD. Seem to be going quite cheap now.
 
You could always look at some second hand 290(x) GPUS if your open to AMD. Seem to be going quite cheap now.

This. If you want to get the best price to performance? An older AMD R9 290 or 290X sell for dirt cheap and offer great performance. Easily matches a GTX 980 SLI setup without that 1.5GB VRAM limit (GTX 680 is when NVIDIA jumped up to 2GB VRAM... which is where I'm stuck and having issues tbh.. so far still works good for 1920x1080 for the most part).

For price to performance? Here's what I'd recommend right meow with cheapest at the top and most expensive at the bottom:



For lower cost cards like the AMD R9 380 or GTX 950? Don't bother with those, they perform about the same as your GTX 580.


As much as I love multi-GPU setups? Sadly with how ridiculously fast VRAM requirements for high end graphics has leaped ridiculously fast since 2013... tbh I'm surprised even 1920x1080 cards are only 2GB... stuff like the AMD R9 380 and GTX 960 will run into the same VRAM limitations I currently hit when trying out multi-GPU unless every high end game supports explicit multi-adapter setups... which is unlikely and will likely become a neiche market much like CrossFire and SLI was during the DirectX 9 days... it's going to take a few years to really take off (which hopefully it does).

Now... I shall stop expanding my post lol as I worry I'm going into rambling territory. :p
 
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Depends on budget, but with newer cards you get the benifits of a little more performance per card, but the thing that would be for me is efficiencies on power. I'm looking at about 5-15% just from a 780-980ti so saving on the electricity bill is nice and obvs got the legs for newer games but I think not just nvidia are getting better with power amd have too. So maybe look at the 780 or amd equivalent sadly I've been nvidia nuts since the 560ti :)
 
Use whatever you have to to justify the upgrade, be it power, temps, convenience etc just get it done :D

You could always look at some second hand 290(x) GPUS if your open to AMD. Seem to be going quite cheap now.

Sitting on a 280x right now and it seems to be ok, even able to play GTA on relatively high settings decent 40fps or so.
 
Loving the replies guys, thanks. The only game I pay at the moment is GTA 5, but will be getting Star Wars Battlefront when it comes out. The budget is kinda a funny issue, I'll either spend as little as possible (£150-£250) on a new card, or just go big and update the whole rig. It's a few years old and could probably do with to be honest
 
Loving the replies guys, thanks. The only game I pay at the moment is GTA 5, but will be getting Star Wars Battlefront when it comes out. The budget is kinda a funny issue, I'll either spend as little as possible (£150-£250) on a new card, or just go big and update the whole rig. It's a few years old and could probably do with to be honest

GTA V and Battlefront? They love eating VRAM... on my mix of high settings on my GTX 680 2GB SLI setup with 1920x1080 and 4xMSAA? I average 1850 MB VRAM... which is of course higher than your 1536 MB VRAM that your GTX 580 SLI setup would be limited to... if I'm running into VRAM issues on my GTX 680 SLI setup on GTA V at 2GB? You could imagine how quickly you'd find yourself lowering settings to not overfill your 1.5GB VRAM.

Here's an example pic... this was taken back when MSI Afterburner suffered a VRAM doubling calculation bug lol so..
3636 MB / 2 = 1818 MB
http://i.imgur.com/T8frZSp.png

and here's what some of my settings looked like. The rest were on High or Very High I think:
http://i.imgur.com/GQaubUt.png

MGS V and Mad Max are probably the best looking games of 2015 that don't push over 1.5GB VRAM whilst looking amazing... The Witcher 3 gets an honorable mention too since it tends to not touch VRAM for how detailed that game is... I haven't touched it in a while though so many bugged quests... might go back to it meow that patch 1.8 is out.

Of course, if you went with an AMD R9 290 or 290X used? In the future you could always pick up a second R9 290(x) and CrossFire them together.
 
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What is the rest of the rig like?

With regards to VRAM once you fill up the VRAM you will encounter "Texture Streaming" as Nvidia call it which basically equates to the game using the paging file on your hard drive to cache from. It's not ideal and causes serious input lag.
 
I'll either spend as little as possible (£150-£250) on a new card, or just go big and update the whole rig.

Derp, sorry I didn't notice that part before lol. :p

http://uk.pcpartpicker.com/parts/video-card/#c=311,312&sort=a8&page=1

AMD R9 390 or get an AMD R9 290X. They're the best cards for £250ish. They will spank a GTX 580 SLI setup anyways. ;)

Otherwise if you want to go all out right meow? NVIDIA GTX 980 Ti. Gigabyte or MSI gaming versions if you can afford them since they're overclocking kings or the EVGA ACX2.0 is cheaper and still a darn good card with a smexy back plate.

But tbh for going all out? I'd wait until 2016... see what happens with the first GPUs released during the DirectX 12 and Vulkan 3D API era of PC Gaming to see if they have better support for all three tiers of DirectX 12 as a prime example.
 
you can get a 970 for about 250 if you try.
i see one on ebay now from a private seller which is new and sealed for the price.
A 780 ti second hand costs more, about the same performance less ram even if you only say the 970 is a 3.5gb card and generally all round slightly better. soo if i had the 250.. id buy that.
 
My rig as it stands now is
Intel Core i5 2500K Unlocked
1536MB MSI GTX 580 Twin FrozR II/OC
NZXT Phantom Enthusiast White Full
16GB (4x4) Corsair Vengeance Blue
1TB Seagate Barracuda
750W Coolermaster RS750
MSI P67A-GD53 (B3), Intel P67
Corsair Hydro Series H70
And a 250gig samsung solid state boot drive. Like I said, it was built a few years ago and its starting to really show its age.
 
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