In that very conclusion he mentions you can't get around the fact the 560 has 1gb memory. So, for the same price, you can get a single card with 2gb of memory that performs really well at your given resolution and, in a years time or whatever, you can get another one cheaper for sli. Your options aren't as instantly limited. Murraynt is right, if you're after a dual gpu set up, it makes most sense to do it with the card you already have to save money.
There is plenty of headroom in the 570 (in general) - mine is at 900/2000 with only a small voltage increase - granted on water but look around and ppl are going well over this on air. Much depends on the chip itself obviously. You may be able to push a 560 to close to a 570 but as a rule the 570 will oc close to a 580... All relative
Actually, having more than 1GB of memory isn't really an advantage at the moment, especially at 1920. Even the benefits at 2560 are negligible. Look at the reviews of the 6950 1GB edition - they found virtually no difference in performance against the 6950 2GB edition.
The future is yet to happen though right? And more is becoming the norm, so that's only for now. Why you'd want a high power draw sli system when one card will do and give you the option to go that route later. I'm sure at some point there was an argument of 256 vs 512 and 512 vs 1024, vram usage is going to go up.
if u really want power just get sli 560's and new psu and it will beat the 580 easy. Or just get 1 570, 580 is not worth it in my opinion. So my vote is 560's, yeah sure you can say that about 580s as in get a 580 further down the line when its cheaper to sli it, but by then directx 12 will be out. Will you really want to get another 580? Or a new directx12 card with new 28nm lower power drain high efficiency card? Just go for sli 560's or 570.
SLI and Crossfire have been available for so long, i would hope that any bugs in the drivers would have been ironed out by now. I picked up my GTX580 for £349, and it's an absolute monster, Highly recommend the GTX580 series. Sam
GTX 580 is a great card i just bought a Second one to use in sli maybe get a 3rd but not sure if my Corsair HX1000 will handle a 3rd card
I dont understand why people get 3 580's??? Can someone explain to me what is the point? If you are using it for gaming, then if your monitor only has 60hz refresh rate then the rest of the frames will be wasted(frames above 60fps), unless you have a 100hz monitor then that might be justifiable.
I think you are missing the point. I brought my 3 GTX 580 when I was running 3 U2410 monitors. Even now after selling them and using my TV as a temporarily thing. It is nice to play Crysis maxed out with 16xQAA and all the setting in Nvidia control panel set to max. BFBC2 looks amazing with 32xAA aswell as Just cause 2. Simon.
this exactly, you may be able to overclock a 560 to 570 levels, but its also likely with a bit of tweaking you can get a 570 close to a 580, its all relative +1 for the 570 if you gaming at 1920 x 1200 and for the price you can get them for at the moment
Where are you going to go with that in the future though? That's a garanteed, you will have to upgrade the whole situation there. Think about it. Ok, two 560s beat the 580 for the same price. 2 years later, your only option, if you want to upgrade is going to be a similar sli system with, say, 2x 760s, or a single 780. You could, stretch out another year or so with two 580s though, which can also be overclocked. I personally don't see why you should go for two when you can have one tbh, unless there's an upgrade path option on the cards, i.e. I own a 560, why not buy another next year. I own a 580, why don't I buy another next year. Otherwise, it's for the sake of sli surely. I spent £400 on two cards to do the job of 1 £400 card! Huh... what?
Just to let you guys know, that SLI does scale very well, more so when you add the third card. Cheers, Simon.
I'm still waiting for the ASUS engtx580 to come into stock, I'm starting to think they are just mythical cards.
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/video/display/geforce-gtx-560-sli.html Yeah. There are gains to be made. But it's still tied to optimisations in software(like any card) You can see in that article it blows away the 580 in quite a few games in the maxfps category and sometimes in the minfps. It's dependant on the game. I personally wouldn't want an experience so fickle, especially as on a lot of those games the min fps with 2 cards is almost the same as a single 580. I wouldn't notice fps in excess of 60 myself.
Thanks for everyones input. I've just ordered a MSI 580 GTX with the custom cooler for delivery tomorrow
