GTX 690 to 980 upgrade worth it?

F

fileid

Limp Gawd
Joined
Mar 20, 2002
Messages
205
Thinking about doing this upgrade since many of the new games being released now a days don't support SLI and require fiddling with nvidiainspector and it's getting pretty frustrating. Wanted some opinions whether I should sell the 690 and make the jump to the 980. Thank you for your time.
 
I wouldn't. I would wait for the next round of cards to be released(should be soon?). It wouldn't be a large enough upgrade to justify the cost with the new cards being right around the corner, in my opinion.
 
Not worth it. I'm still on dual 680 4gb cards and sold my 980 off a week later because I didn't see much to any improvement at all unless it was on 1080p res.
 
Depends on your res, at 1080p definitely stick with the 690 (which I had at one point, loved that card). At 1440p and above 2gb will be a limiting factor at times.
 
I ran 680's in SLI before switching to a 780ti and very shortly after getting the 980 ACX (Via Step-Up).

I say do it as the performance is similar but the noise/power decrease is substantial. I literally love this card and barring any unforseen upgrade to 4k, Im quite happy with its performance on both a 1080p 144hz BenQ, and a 34UM95 (3440x1440).
 
If the OP is already at HD+, the jump to a 980 is worth it. It goes toe-to-toe with a 690, and in a couple of those benches really smokes the 690 where the 690 is probably out of memory. The OP gets to go back to a single card again and ditch the frustrations of dealing with SLI.

The 980 will be very relevant even after AMD releases its 3xx stuff; but, in my mind the only question and perhaps show-stopper for going out and grabbing a 980 now is how much cheaper will it be if the 390X is faster and NVidia has to reduce pricing. The 980 is an expensive son of a gun currently and it would suck if the OP spent a couple hundred extra on a slower card versus say the 390X.
 
Last edited:
I went from a GTX 295 (old SLI card similar to 690 for its day) to a 680 then to sli 970's. I now game at 4k and I can tell you 2 GB is going to limit you (hell @4k 4GB is boarderline). I really have never had much of a problem with SLI. I'm sure others have and do have but honestly there maybe one or two AAA titles that don't support it out of the gate but usually do a week or two later at the most. The only game I have that doesn't scale SLI well is watchdogs and it still a 40-50 percent increase over the single card.
 
I say get gtx 970 sli but I have great experiences with sli and that's just me
 
w35t said:
Depends on your res, at 1080p definitely stick with the 690 (which I had at one point, loved that card). At 1440p and above 2gb will be a limiting factor at times.
Click to expand...

I'm running 2x Asus 27" 1080p monitors so no 1440p gaming. I play alot of early access games on steam so, yes, trying to get SLI to work can be frustrating if there isn't a workaround for it.
 
I switched from SLI 680's on my main machine to a single 980, not for lack of raw horse power but the vram limitation was causing issues (also the 980 can pull ahead in the HP department when SLI scaling isn't great or non existent).
 
The 980 is roughly 20% faster than a single 970. When I bought my 970's they were only $100 more than a single 980. If 80 percent of the game you play don't use SLI properly I could see getting a 980 but any percentage less than that seems wasteful to me. Even if it was a 50/50 split your talking about a huge performance increase with the SLI setup and not a very large performance "hit" when not using SLI with a 970. Most games would hit well over 60 FPS @1080p with a 970.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top