Add another 1070 or just buy a 1080?

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Sid6_7

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Hey guys, I need your thoughts... i have the chance to add another 1070 to my original 1070 to go sli, but i keep hearing SLI is dying and should go with single card. Should I just go ahead and go SLI 1070 since it is faster than a single 1080, but how bad is SLI issues if any?

Thanks in advance guys!
 
What resolution are you on? Some people will deter you from SLI at all costs. Some will say just do it. If it's a cheap upgrade, go for it. If it's full price at you're at 1080p/144hz or 1440p at 60hz I'd probably either keep your 1070 as it's enough, or if you can get a good deal on a 1080 and sell off your 1070 for a good price, go for that. Also what is the rest of your system?

I will always recommend a single strong card over a couple slightly weaker ones personally. Just less hassle, heat, noise. But I also run an ITX rig which also emphasizes my own choice of single-card all the way.
 
Thanks for the quick response Repear! I am currently running 1440p at 100hz. Actually purchasing a new computer with a 1070 already in there and just going to add mine. Going to give my old rig to my son who has a 980 sitting around.
 
If you're already pretty much getting that with the purchase, and at 1440p at higher than 60 I think 1070 SLI is viable enough, sure. Will keep you going for a while I think, assuming game-permits.
 
Sli bring the heat.. best if water cooling or don't mind noise with blower style fe cards. If your pairing a custom card other then a blower go single 1080.
 
Thank you both! Wish there was a way to predict how SLI support is going to be like in the future.

Eclypse, I notice you are running SLI cards. Do you run into a lot of major issues with games or is it once in a great while?
 
Running them together always as I've had since 3Dfx days.. heh no problems no tweaking to get them to run. Tops. 2 is always better then 1.
 
IMHO, hold out with your lone 1070 until the 1080 Ti hits (supposedly later this year), and then dump the 1070 asap (while you can still get good money for it). A nice, custom, AIB 1080 Ti should be quite good, given what we have seen so far from Pascal Titan X (25% gains over a stock GTX 1080, and probably 30-40% gains with certain custom 1080 Tis). Your other option is going Volta later in 2017, at this point (not really holding out too much hope for Vega 10, but keeping my fingers crossed, still).
 
tungt88 said:
IMHO, hold out with your lone 1070 until the 1080 Ti hits (supposedly later this year), and then dump the 1070 asap (while you can still get good money for it). A nice, custom, AIB 1080 Ti should be quite good, given what we have seen so far from Pascal Titan X (25% gains over a stock GTX 1080, and probably 30-40% gains with certain custom 1080 Tis). Your other option is going Volta later in 2017, at this point (not really holding out too much hope for Vega 10, but keeping my fingers crossed, still).
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Where did you hear this? All the rumors I've seen have been pointing at a January 2017 reveal at CES.
 
exlink said:
Where did you hear this? All the rumors I've seen have been pointing at a January 2017 reveal at CES.
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Yeah, you're right -- I was going straight from (faulty) memory on that one. That's what happens when you had a good amount of vodka and whiskey before typing, lol. :p
 
People like to hate on SLI, but it still works for a lot of games. Not every one, but I would say most games get some benefit, more or less.
 
cybereality said:
People like to hate on SLI, but it still works for a lot of games. Not every one, but I would say most games get some benefit, more or less.
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I guess the issue is the 'some benefit' part. I guess you're guaranteed 1x card will give you all of its performance, but the second card can give you anywhere from 0-99 of its performance as well. Some games just don't accept SLI, others do it really well and you get almost perfect scaling.

However it introduces issues around heat, noise and power draw I suppose some people don't want. And some 'microstuttering' was an issue years ago, but not sure if this is apparent anymore, or if it's not a big enough issue anymore to be noticeable.

I personally like low noise compact systems, so multi-card makes no sense for me. I also have a very hot room with no air con for summer (In Australia), so less heat dumped into my room is good to me XD.
 
I went with 1080, that's coming from a 1440p/144hz monitor as the main gaming monitor.

If TPU's 1080 SLI scaling can be taken to also apply for 1070, at 1440p the scaling, barring exceptions, is abyssmal (TPU has it scaling to an average of 45%, that's exclusively including games that scaled at all).

At 4k, 1080 SLI scales quite well, at 1440p, it falls off the cliff (this is basically why I had been trying to get my hands on Titan XP rather than going SLI 1080).

However, 1070 has a smaller performance difference to 1080 than 1080 was to Titan XP, so 1070 SLI comparatively might not be as bad.

I also had my own share of SLI issues (I went with 970 SLI instead of 980 last gen).

If I were playing SLI scaled games religiously, then 1080 SLI might have been a better proposition, but 1070 SLI was never on the table.
 
Yeah, I have had some problems here and there with SLI (stutter, etc.) that I think would not have happened on a single card.

I think once you reach up to really high resolutions (in my case 7680x1440) you do see the best case for SLI scaling (and it's also at these high resolutions where single GPUs may not cut it).

For the OP, it sounds like they already have the card or are set on buying it. I'd say toss it in the machine and try out your favorite titles. If it works, great. If not, you can still sell both 1070s and easily trade that for a single 1080.
 
To echo what many have said already, and going from 15 years of exp with many mGPU setups, a single powerful card is always preferable -- the reasons for which have already been enumerated. For me, time is money and often having to wait for drivers and continually messing with profiles is the biggest reason to steer clear. The only time you should go mGPU is if there is absolutely no single card that will get you acceptable FPS, and even then I'd still consider waiting.

With this case in particular, you have 1080 ti incoming (if a single 1080 won't cut it), and nV seems to have alluded to changing focus from mGPU of late.
 
eclypse said:
Running them together always as I've had since 3Dfx days.. heh no problems no tweaking to get them to run. Tops. 2 is always better then 1.
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Sure in fantasy land where SLI always works and never causes any issues. Meanwhile back in reality even a lot of AAA games either dont support SLI at all or have major issues. That does not even include the games with poor scaling, artifacting, stutter or the games that get broken from various driver or game updates. If you want to delude yourself then great but I think making it sound like its all roses to someone else is pathetic.
 
cybereality said:
For the OP, it sounds like they already have the card or are set on buying it. I'd say toss it in the machine and try out your favorite titles. If it works, great. If not, you can still sell both 1070s and easily trade that for a single 1080.
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IMO this is the best way to go. Sell the 1070 it comes with (definitely test it out first though, see how your frames are in your desired games) and if you decide it's not for you, sell it and be over half way towards a 1080.

I have a 1080 paired with a 1440p 144hz gsync monitor and I can safely say that card destroys most games I play, with Witcher 3 being the most demanding. With NV hairworks turned off and everything else maxed, I regularly get between 85-110 fps depending on the area to give you some idea of the performance. Everything else I play can damn near run at 140+. I'm extremely happy with it.

As far as SLI goes, you'll get every opinion under the sun on it, ranging from its a POS, don't touch it ever, to those who swear by it. Personally, I'd go for the guaranteed performance I'm paying for in every game and go with a single card solution.
 
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None of the above. SLI blows and 1080 isn't a big enough jump over a 1070.
 
I'll have to check if battlefield 1 is using sli or not but when I played it the first time the other night I was seeing 145+ fps on my 2560x1440 165hz asus g-sync monitor with the settings all maxed out to ultra.

That's on my 4.8ghz i7 6700k and evga classified sli at 2190mhz. All water cooled.

No lock ups and damn smooth!

Edit. I was using DX 11. Have not tried dx12 yet in the game.
 
I keep hearing about people and sli issues. I've been running SLI for a while and rarely, when I say rarely I mean never, run into issues.

The only negative is that is just scale as high as people would like. You would think that double GPU would double the performance but it doesn't thats my only gripe.

SLI.

EDIT: SLI doesn't work with BF1 in dx12 supposedly but it works for me in dx11
 
I never had any major issues when I had my SLI 670s. They lasted me almost 4 years together and are still going strong, albeit separated in different PCs.
 
TorryHolt81 said:
I keep hearing about people and sli issues. I've been running SLI for a while and rarely, when I say rarely I mean never, run into issues.

The only negative is that is just scale as high as people would like. You would think that double GPU would double the performance but it doesn't thats my only gripe.

SLI.

EDIT: SLI doesn't work with BF1 in dx12 supposedly but it works for me in dx11
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Figured.. that's why my gut said to stick with dx11 for now.

Game obviously played great for my son on my 2nnd rig with 4790k and 980 sli. All not overclocked cause the wife wouldn't let me grab anything other then a Asus 1080 144hz monitor. So overkill for that monitor but figured it would be best anyways since the 980 only has 4gb vram. Plays like butter hehe.

Safe to say starting out with high frame rate he won't be able to run 60hz in the future.
 
SLI gtx 1070 - GeForce GTX 1070 2-way SLI review

"As we have seen often, multi-GPU remains to be challenging especially with high-end and enthusiast class cards. There's a lot CPU limitation in the lower resolutions that will effect SLI scaling, in 1080P for example that mostly is negative scaling due to driver overhead. And as such imho SLI is mostly advised with Ultra HD screens or multi-screen configurations. We do have to say that over the previous driver things improved a bit, the GTX 1070 does make much more sense money wise (in SLI) over the 1080 SLI obviously. We are still running into issues with multiple games like Anno 2205, Doom and in DirectX 12 Rise of the Tomb Raider (DX12) and Hitman 2016 (DX12)."
 
I game at 4k so that additional GTX 1070 really helps in SLI. With the exception of Rise of the Tomb Raider and Crysis 3, I'm able to easily maxing out Doom, Metal Gear Solid 5, Far Cry 4, GTA V @60 FPS with room to spare which would not be possible with a single GTX 1080. Plus I like the look of 2 cards in my system.

Been SLI'ing for a while now so a single GPU in a system looks funny to me. Like something is missing :p
 
Not even worth it going from a 1070 to 1080. It's really late in the game to be buying a Pascal card. Just wait for Volta. You'd really feel the difference that way. It's only a few months out.
 
ForgedReality said:
Not even worth it going from a 1070 to 1080. It's really late in the game to be buying a Pascal card. Just wait for Volta. You'd really feel the difference that way. It's only a few months out.
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Uh, when do you think Volta is launching? We're probably getting a 1080Ti in 2-3 months and Volta will be months past that.
 
Ultima99 said:
Uh, when do you think Volta is launching? We're probably getting a 1080Ti in 2-3 months and Volta will be months past that.
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March-ish. I have my doubts on a 1080 Ti existing. There's not a whole lot of room from a technical standpoint between the 1080 and Titan XP.
 
I'll say what I always say.

SLI and Crossfire only make sense with top end cards, and are positions of last resort -- in other words, get the fastest single card available, and if that isn't fast enough for your purposes then and only then consider multi-GPU. At the moment, that would mean restricting it to Titan XPs, or a little more realistically, 1080s, as the RX480 (while a good card for what it is) can't begin to compete with Nvidia's current offerings in terms of pure performance.

You're almost always going to be better off with a single faster card than two slower cards, even if the single faster card isn't as fast as the two slower cards in tandem when they're scaling well... because they won't always scale well, and sometimes won't scale at all.

SLI also means double power draw, double heat, and double noise. More complexity, more points of failure, more compatibility issues, more tweaking and fiddling to get things working well. Some enjoy this aspect, working for the performance -- many don't.

I've run a few different multi-GPU setups -- 8800 GTX 2 and 3 way SLI, Radeon 4890 Crossfire, Radeon 6970 Crossfire, and now GTX 980Ti SLI. If the GTX 1080 had existed when I purchased my cards I would have happily got it (or two of them) vs my current setup.
 
silent-circuit said:
I'll say what I always say.

SLI and Crossfire only make sense with top end cards, and are positions of last resort -- in other words, get the fastest single card available, and if that isn't fast enough for your purposes then and only then consider multi-GPU. At the moment, that would mean restricting it to Titan XPs, or a little more realistically, 1080s, as the RX480 (while a good card for what it is) can't begin to compete with Nvidia's current offerings in terms of pure performance.

You're almost always going to be better off with a single faster card than two slower cards, even if the single faster card isn't as fast as the two slower cards in tandem when they're scaling well... because they won't always scale well, and sometimes won't scale at all.

SLI also means double power draw, double heat, and double noise. More complexity, more points of failure, more compatibility issues, more tweaking and fiddling to get things working well. Some enjoy this aspect, working for the performance -- many don't.

I've run a few different multi-GPU setups -- 8800 GTX 2 and 3 way SLI, Radeon 4890 Crossfire, Radeon 6970 Crossfire, and now GTX 980Ti SLI. If the GTX 1080 had existed when I purchased my cards I would have happily got it (or two of them) vs my current setup.
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So if I were to listen to you I should I only buy a Titan XP and only SLI Titan XP and SLI is complex, so lots of tweaking to get it right....? Everyone's entitled to their own opinions but I don't agree with you at all. My GTX 1070s allow me to game comfortably maxing out games in 4K for GTA V, Doom, Metal Gear, Battlefield, etc... which would not be possible with 1 GTX 1070 or even 1 GTX 1080.
 
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1070 SLI in BF1 under DX11 has been nothing short of fantastic at 4K maxed.
I'm sure single card owners are turning down the settings at 4K.

If you play a lot of non-AAA games, I'll get a Titan X.
 
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WorldExclusive said:
1070 SLI in BF1 under DX11 has been nothing short of fantastic at 4K maxed.
I'm sure single card owners are turning down the settings at 4K.

If you play a lot of non-AAA games, I'll get a Titan X.
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But if you like to Game with everything maxed out with high 144-165+ fps grab 1080 sli.

I game at 4k using dsr on my asus 2560x1440 165hz monitor at 100-144+fps and that's awesome. Regular 4k monitors are limited to 60hz atm.
 
eclypse said:
But if you like to Game with everything maxed out with high 144-165+ fps grab 1080 sli.

I game at 4k using dsr on my asus 2560x1440 165hz monitor at 100-144+fps and that's awesome. Regular 4k monitors are limited to 60hz atm.
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Yes, but if he's playing a lot of Indie titles and Microsoft games, a Titan X would be better. I like 1080s also but I think a we were coming close to a 1080Ti release, so I say only buy them used.
I have a 60Hz 4K TV because I also use it for multimedia work. When I see a OLED 4K 120Hz 40"+ monitor under $2000, I will switch.
 
Thank you Everyone!!! There is much to say about this community and how helpful everyone is. Thank you for all your opinions! I borrowed a friends 1070 and going to try it out for a bit. Agree that DX12 does need to mature a bit more for SLI. Again, Thanks everyone! It is much appreciated!
 
Congrats on being able to borrow a buddy's card. That's the way to go imo. I'm always a bit hesitant with SLI, when it works its nice, but it can be quite the hassle as well. I personally prefer a single card, but if it works for you and the games you play, but all means go with the second 1070.
 
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