8800gt SLI Question

[orangeble]

I was originally planning on upgrading to the new nVidia GTX 260 or 280 when they came out, but after reading some early reviews they seem to be a bit of a dissappointment. They are not the Crysis killer that everyone had hoped for, they are fairly expensize, and are so large that I would probably have to replace my midsized case and get better cooling. As a result, I have began to look at other options. (I currently have a single 8800gts 640mb, and will be using a 750i motherboard with 4 gigs of ram and an E8400.)

Now the 8800gt alone already beats my card, and at its current price point, SLI actually looks like a viable solution considering I can get an OCed version for $180 (might even be lower once all the new cards come out). So my question is, how does an 8800gt SLI setup compare with other graphic card options? Does it beat the 8800GTX and the 9800GTX, and would it come close to the performance of a single GTX260? Now I know that someone would say, "Look at the benchmarks," but frankly I can't seem to understand them. They all seem to produce different results, and they all use different standards, so I was hoping that the people here could help clarify the situation for me.

(Note: I am not considering an ATI card, so those do not factor into the equation for me.)

 

[GoldenTiger]

Long story short... if you want to run at higher resolutions *OR* higher quality levels with AA/AF and high in-game settings, you're going to want to go for the 260, not the 8800GT SLI. SLI is very driver-dependent and suffers from "microstuttering" which can be read about elsewhere. If you're trying to save cash, the SLI setup will do fine, but the 260 will provide a better experience by a good bit.

 

[TKD]

I currently game at 1920*1080, and have decided to switch from 8800GT SLI to a GTX 280. I can attest that the SLI problems that GoldenTiger refers to are real, and for me were annoying enough that I wanted to go back to a single powerful GPU, even at a substantial cost. A 260 would be smoother than 8800GT SLI, and wouldn't be as limited in memory-intensive scenarios, due to the wider memory bus and more effective memory overall.