Yeap, I went down to NCIX and picked up a pair of MSI GeForce 560Ti Twin Frozer II's for a grand total of $450 ($225/card) - about $90 less than a single 580 GTX. Benchmarking the system in Just Cause 2, and Crysis so far and all I can say is: WOW. WOW. WOW. Compared to a single 580 GTX these two cards scream. It is complete and utter unadulterated hardware porn. I compared my FPS performance to Bit-Tech's 580 review (as I run a similar system to their test setup) and wow - it competes blow for blow with the 580. Just Cause 2: 1920x1200 4xAA 16xAF + Everything Maxed out, I ran the benchmarks and hit the games 60 fps limit [Desert Sun]. That is, my average FPS after the benchmarks was 59.8fps with lowest FPS being 58. And 47fps for [Concrete Jungle] I am now on the hunt for more benchmarking apps but that may take a few hours as I am in the process of squeeling like a little schoolgirl.
Just read about Bit-Tech's disclaimer about the settings they disabled (GPU water, Bokeh, and Motion blur). Re-ran the benchmarks... I'm now averaging 8-9 FPS FASTER than the 580 GTX in average frame-rate on Concrete Jungle. These cards are currently stock, not overclocked (except for the 5% base overclock by MSI).
they beat 1 580 by far. And if you overclock them(some chips can go 1000mhz), they will bury the 580 50 ft under. You get much more yield by overclocking 560's compared to 580's. I think u made the best choice for your money . Now wait for DX12 which is coming out next month. Haha only kidding.
SLI is great...so long as the frame rate doesn't drop to below 30fps...and when it does, it usually doesn't feel as smooth as a single GPU at the same frame rate due to shuttering.
nah. think about it, two 560 has 1.5x power of 580 in terms of shader count (and not yet counting clock speed for each shader), yet only performs similar to 580. great value though.
Scales fine for me, some games give me nearly twice the performance from a single GPU, others still give me enough to play them with full detail, like Just Cause 2 and Crysis. Some games do suffer a bit from microstutter if the fps goes below 30 but most are fine. The only problem now is that for some reason Nvidia are taking forever to release new drivers or SLI profiles, they used to be fairly quick off the mark.
In the UK, getting two 560s is no cheaper than a 580. I could have gone for the same setup but preferred a powerful single card. Arguments between the 580 and two 560s are a tad academic though as they both offer buckets of power and are reliable.
There speaks a man without SLI lol Works and scales great on mine p And thank god for the Esc key lol
i thought crossfire scales better (from benchmarks) and that they release profiles in between driver updates so it works better? or does SLi work even better out of the box?
Up until recently SLI has had better support and better scaling, I think things are evening out now though.
I think the improvements in scaling and drivers have made X-fire/SLi far more attractive this generation. In the past I've had both 8800GT SLi and 4890 X-fire, neither of which I thought were good value, but from the figures I've seen lately, particularly 460/560 sli and 6850/6870 X-fire, things have come a long way. Personally, with the improvements I've seen, I'd like to see more benchmarks involving SLi and X-fire from BT and CPC in future. I realise that a single card is still the preferable option, but I think these technologies are more viable than ever.
6870 X-fire here. Works great. You do sometimes have to fiddle with things like RadeonPro to get the best out of it for some games but even that's very rare. I'm totally pleased with my 2 6870's.
I wasn't talking about scaling, I was more refering to the driver support. When Crossfire works properly, they are great...but when they don't, it would annoy the users to the point of wanting to pull their hair out. Crossfire performance issues and problems doesn't affect all user, but when you are unlucky enough to be one of the user that runs into problem, the only cure is usually switching to a single card, which many 5970 owners have done. I forgot how many times that I read people says switch from a 5970 to a GTX480 fell smoother in actual gaming experience, despite 5970 is supposed to be the faster card.
