I currently have a MSI HD 6870. I would like to know from all you smart people on here if it would be better to crossfire another 6870 with my current one or buy a GTX 570? Would the Xfire be better then the single 570? The 580 and other similar cards are pretty much out of the question due to price at this time. And note that the 6870 is about $100 less then a 570. Thank you for any thoughts on this.
You will get better performance from the xfire'd 6870's (not 6970's like I first said) but at a cost: more power and more heat. If you can afford it you are always better off going for a single card rather than a multi-gpu set up. What resolutions are you gaming at?
Plus Xfire tends to suffer more from microstutter than SLI. I would have thought in most cases if a 560 ti can pretty much handle anything up to 1080p then a 570 would be more than enough. Unless there is anything you can think of that is particularly demanding or maybe there is something coming up you want to play like battlefront 3 (only speculating that it may be more demanding than most games) that would need the extra power, the 570 should be more than enough. Plus you will be able to use Physx in games like Arkham City.
Go for a 570, maybe even a 560Ti and overclock it. It's a great card after all and will save you a little over the 570.
I'm not sure if some of you understood the question I was asking and if you did sorry for this but, my question is which is better. 2x 6870's or 1x 570? If I sold my current 6870 I might as well splurge a little and get a 580 or like a 6970
100% gaming. And when I mean better i mean overall performance. Current 2 games I play are Wow and SC2, But have BF3, Diablo 3, and SWTOR preordered. So I want max EVERYTHING on those . I played Rift a little and was able to max everything on that except AA, I had to put that one notch down or it would lag a little.
I expect either would handle most of those games, BF3 will probably need more than most grunt. The recommended specs list the GTX460 or 6850. The crossfire configuration would give you the most performance but the 560 isn't that far behind and would require less power to run.
This chart from a GTX 570 SLI review also shows the 6870 xfire configuration and a single GTX 570 performance in a direct comparison in BC2 @ 1920x1200 @ 8xAA @ 16xAF. http://www.guru3d.com/article/geforce-gtx-570-sli-review/6
2 x 6870's will give better performance, but could suffer from microstutter in BF3 as they do in BF2.
Played the bf3 alpha with my cf 6870's. Great performance and no microstutter. In fact I don't get microstutter in any games. Cf either works for a game as there is a profile for it, needs to be tricked into working using radeonpro or just doesn't work for particular games. If you play big name titles you shouldn't have any problems.