As the title suggests, I'm curious if anyone has experience of these two graphics set ups? I can save a great deal of power if I can run 1x GTX970 as opposed to 2x GTX670s. I'm not after a performance upgrade necessarily, but would a single 970 equal my 670 SLI set up? I know it may do on 1080P resolutions, but I game at 2560x1600 so any idea how it would stack up?
If they were equivalent I would go with 970. This helps a lot on bad console pets with poor sli profiles. The performance of 1 970 would be similar to two 670s. For me, I would need to see a good performance boost as well to justify the upgrade.
My old 780ti was not as fast as my old SLI 670 4GBs. I never tested the 780 on the u2711 mind, but in the futuremarks and unigine the 670s were clearly more powerful. It would depend on the game and profile/drivers. This is also based on the belief the 780 ti is comparable to a 970! Here is my comparison of 3d mark 11 with the 670s and 780ti
It offers similar performance for less power overhead and no driver hassles is the basics of it. If you clock it to 980 speeds it would be faster though
So the question is "Is 1 x 970 twice as powerful as 2 x 670's probably not but pretty close I would think. lol@ rollo he all ways has to get the "drive hassles" dig in I've never had these problems he imagines
You have not Nvidia and AMD forums suggest a lot of others have. I've personally never had too many issues, outside of alpha beta games anyway. Question really should be 2 970s vs the 2 670s as that's surely the upgrade path. If a lot more money option.
Might as well upgrade to the single card... and considering the 670 4gb still holds a pretty good value in the used market if you sell them both it will take care of up to 90% of that 970. Lower power use, and if you go for one of the 970 with the acx type cooler it will be a LOT quieter than 2 gpu with the blower style cooler. Should have at least similar performance in games... but the 970 blows the 670 away in compute performance if you happen to use gpu for anything besides gaming. 970 should also have better performance on opengl and is DX12 ready. 970 also has almost 3x the pixel rate which should mean it will do a lot better with 1440p+ resolutions.
Of course... but I want to save power, not have more performance. I can play everything at 1600p now with no issues, so wasting more power for no realistic gain seems silly. If I was upgrading to 4K yeah... I see your point, and I'd probably be looking at 2x 980s in that case... but right now.. I can save over 150 watts, have similar or same performance, and almost no capital outlay. I've had absolutely no driver hassles either. My cards have just worked. That's not a reason for me.. the thought of saving over 150 watts with no performance hit, and being able to recoup most of the cost through selling the 670s appeals though. I do use the GPUs for preview rendering in premier, so that's a plus in my favour, and the higher pixel rate will help. I think that settles it. I'll go with one 970. Thanks for advice all.
Just an update on this if anyone is interested. The single GTX970 is saving me 148 watts, and performance is around 10% less than I had with my GTX670 SLI set up, which I am happy with. All my games exceed 60fps still, and my system is now DX12 capable, cooler, and considerably quieter when gaming. I now have the option of adding a second GTX970 should I need it, but overall, despite -10% performance, I can't actually notice it in actual gaming.
Not bad. I hope to grab a 970 sometime soon for myself. Make sure it installed in pci-e 3.0 mode. I had to fiddle around a bit to get my 670 to do so on my x79 set up. Driver installer seems to assume 2.0 mode and not check. I had to run a batch script to get it on higher speed. Getting it in 3.0 mode did have some positive effect on performance, at least on benchmark anyway.
