GTX 1070 SLI?

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Dr3amCast

Weaksauce
Joined
Aug 8, 2012
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I have a 4k monitor in my current set-up along with 2x r9 290's. These have served me well for the most part...when there's actual crossfire support for the games I'm trying to play. However, I've been looking to upgrade and boarded the hype train a few weeks ago for destination GTX 1080/1070.

After reading the GTX 1080 reviews that have come out so far, I don't see the performance gains vs my 2x r9 290's to justify the $599 for that card. Yes, it definitely is a performance improvement along with the convenience of drivers in a single gpu set-up. However, the idea came to my head of doing 2 GTX 1070's in SLI.

I wanted to know what current nvidia users experience with SLI has been? If they'd recommend going that approach for 60fps 4k. I haven't owned an nvidia card since the 8800GT (favorite card of all that I've owned). I've been hoping to jump off of AMD for awhile now, I'm just sick of waiting sometimes months for drivers, performance fixes, etc.
 
SLI support in games has been waning the past few years. Personally, I don't think it is worth the hassle anymore. But generally, my experience was pretty solid with a pair of 780s and 970s, averaging 60-70% scaling across most of the games I played. Getting regular SLI profile updates both through drivers and GeForce Experience is a plus.
 
Armenius said:
SLI support in games has been waning the past few years. Personally, I don't think it is worth the hassle anymore. But generally, my experience was pretty solid with a pair of 780s and 970s, averaging 60-70% scaling across most of the games I played. Getting regular SLI profile updates both through drivers and GeForce Experience is a plus.
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SLI really has become more of a pain than its worth. Support for it seems to keep eroding, and for every game it does work on, it seems like there are two more where either it doesn't work or it actually harms performance. I've been running SLI/Xfire since the radeon 4870 days when it seemed like support was growing, but in the last few years, it seems that multi-gpu continues to fall out of favor. Surprises me given the push for VR, you'd think they'd want all the power you could muster.
 
I use SLI, and have used multi-card for the last 4 years, but I would also caution against it as well, because sometimes it is a headache. I understand that I'm the exception to the norm; I rarely play the AAA titles at launch, and the majority of the time I'm using single card for my more common games (CS:GO, Civ V) while the other card does something else, like folding.
 
I've been running Nvidia 3-way and 4-way SLI setups for the past few generations (3x 980 TI, 4x Titans, 4x GTX670, 3 GTX580, 3x GTX480). Most of the time I haven't run into SLI issues unless the game just flat out won't support it (Just Cause 3). Fallout 4 took a custom profile at launch to play well in 4K but that eventually got ironed out. If you are willing to wait on drivers then go ahead.

I still have my 4K monitor but I've moved on to the 2560x1440p 165hz Gsync monitor for gaming. I won't look back until they have a 4K monitor doing 120hz with Gsync. Because of this monitor preference I'm only going to buy two 1080s instead of 3. I want to keep my minimums completely out of the low 50's in every game as much as possible.
 
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It really comes down to how good a card the 1070 is and how it scales in SLI, but I always buy the fastest single GPU I can afford. Then I sometime buy a second one later for SLI as a cheaper upgrade than buying the newest single GPU card out. This way I leap-frog a coupld generations of GPUs for the least cost. My latest was I bought a gtx 670, which was plenty powerful enough at the time. Then I bought a second one at a very cheap price instead of upgrading to a 780 Ti for similar performance. Then I upgraded to a single 980 Ti when the two 670's weren't enough. My next video upgrade will most likely be a second 980 Ti, bought on a super sale or used, and there will be nothing in the single GPU offerings for a long time that will be significantly faster than the two of them. Spending a lot of money on two lesser cards that give you no upgrade path (next upgrade both of them will have to go) makes no sense to me financially. Go big initially then add another if you need to IMO.

There are circumstances where two cards in SLI would be better than a flagship though. The 670's I was mentioning earlier were very close to the performance of 680's for significantly less money. The 680 wasn't enough of an increase in performance to warrant buying it instead of the 670 (or SLI 670's) If I remember correctly you could buy two gtx 460's for less than a gtx 480 and blow away the gtx 480. So there are some instances where it would make sense. The 1070 would have to be pretty damn cheap and pretty damn fast in SLI with great scaling to warrant what you are talking about though.
 
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