Hey folks, long time lurker rarely post much though.
Anyways, I have a question, hopefully you guys can help.
I currently have a GeForce 8800GT 512MB gfx card. It runs most things well on my 1920x1200 23" display. I don't play anything too intensive, and the rest of my rig is pretty good, I'll throw it in my sig after I post this, but suffice it to say, it's an i7 920 with 6GB of RAM and a SSD. Clearly my GPU is the weak point.
The games I do play are things like WoW, and the occasional shooter. So far I've been pretty satisfied with the settings I can run most things at, obviously limited by my GPU. My only grievance is that if I am running something, like, world of warcraft for example, I can't really multitask. It seems like it's playing it just fine but really taxing the system. GPU-Z reveals that the GPU memory usage is maxing out as well, corroborating my theory. So when I tab out, say to do something in Photoshop, photoshop becomes very laggy. Even non-intensive things like watching a dvd-quality movie starts skipping frames. It's bearable but I'd like a smoother experience.
Anyways, that brings me to my point. My motherboard supports SLI, so I suppose a quick fix would be to purchase another 8800gt on the cheap, maybe ebay for ~$50-70. I could also hold out, as I've recently dropped ~900 on the mobo/cpu/RAM/SSD upgrade, and couldn't really afford a new graphics card on the same purchase. So, I could wait, save up, and buy either a GTX470 or Radeon 5850.
I'm aware the SLI option would be more power intensive(I only have a 500W PSU) and clearly not a very good long term solution. But it would also be about 7 times cheaper, which is pretty important. And it would let me run things a bit more smoothly(I hope).
Which leads me to another question, can I tell my computer to run WoW on one card and then leave the other card for everything else? Do I get that kind of control? What kind of performance should I expect?
tldr: 8800GT SLI now? or wait for a GTX470/5850 later?
Sorry I got a bit long winded! Thanks for reading.
Anyways, I have a question, hopefully you guys can help.
I currently have a GeForce 8800GT 512MB gfx card. It runs most things well on my 1920x1200 23" display. I don't play anything too intensive, and the rest of my rig is pretty good, I'll throw it in my sig after I post this, but suffice it to say, it's an i7 920 with 6GB of RAM and a SSD. Clearly my GPU is the weak point.
The games I do play are things like WoW, and the occasional shooter. So far I've been pretty satisfied with the settings I can run most things at, obviously limited by my GPU. My only grievance is that if I am running something, like, world of warcraft for example, I can't really multitask. It seems like it's playing it just fine but really taxing the system. GPU-Z reveals that the GPU memory usage is maxing out as well, corroborating my theory. So when I tab out, say to do something in Photoshop, photoshop becomes very laggy. Even non-intensive things like watching a dvd-quality movie starts skipping frames. It's bearable but I'd like a smoother experience.
Anyways, that brings me to my point. My motherboard supports SLI, so I suppose a quick fix would be to purchase another 8800gt on the cheap, maybe ebay for ~$50-70. I could also hold out, as I've recently dropped ~900 on the mobo/cpu/RAM/SSD upgrade, and couldn't really afford a new graphics card on the same purchase. So, I could wait, save up, and buy either a GTX470 or Radeon 5850.
I'm aware the SLI option would be more power intensive(I only have a 500W PSU) and clearly not a very good long term solution. But it would also be about 7 times cheaper, which is pretty important. And it would let me run things a bit more smoothly(I hope).
Which leads me to another question, can I tell my computer to run WoW on one card and then leave the other card for everything else? Do I get that kind of control? What kind of performance should I expect?
tldr: 8800GT SLI now? or wait for a GTX470/5850 later?
Sorry I got a bit long winded! Thanks for reading.