Tax Refund means upgrade: 3-way on GTX 580 or 570

A

AlexanderMorou

n00b
Joined
Apr 23, 2010
Messages
21
Well,

I built the system in my signature back in May of 2010, and I decided that since my original goal was a bit more horsepower for the video side of things, I'd wait until I could afford to upgrade it all the way before I finished it off.

Right now I'm using an nVidia GTX 480 Super clocked from EVGA, while it's a great card and does most of what I want, the next generation of games might cause it to choke a bit (thinking Crysis 2 will do some of this once it's out.)

Since I'm sure to get enough to hit up a 3-way SLI setup this go around, I figured while I can buy three 580s, the price/performance just doesn't warrant it (especially since even the i7 980x doesn't seem to scale too well on the third card, from the reviews I've been able to find.)

The question is, which setup makes the most sense: 3x GTX 580 or 3x GTX 570? I'm asking this primarily because I couldn't get much information associated to how well the 570 scales from one to two and then to three versus the 580. Insight appreciated.
 
you really dont need 3 580's if you get two more 480's or even one for that matter.. nothing will touch that setup. My two 460's handled everything i throw at it. avg min 100-150 fps. BC2

Use that money you have saved going with sli 480's and buy yourself a nice stereoscopic display and 3d glasses..

Brings gaming to a whole new level. I always laugh when i see these awesome SLI setups and the people don't even utilize half the card's gpu or 3D features.
 
MadOblivion said:
you really dont need 3 580's if you get two more 480's or even one for that matter.. nothing will touch that setup. My two 460's handled everything i throw at it. avg min 100-150 fps. BC2

Use that money you have saved going with sli 480's and buy yourself a nice stereoscopic display and 3d glasses..

Brings gaming to a whole new level. I always laugh when i see these awesome SLI setups and the people don't even utilize half the card's gpu or 3D features.
Click to expand...

My issue with the 480 is the heat output and power requirements. Even given that the 580 has more horsepower it puts out less heat and uses less power. This fact alone makes me think it would be more appropriate to replace the GPU that's in there now with an alternative if I were to use an SLI setup. My main concern is SLI increases heat and the 480 already hovers at levels I don't really like. The GPU's heat increases the overall system heat, and compounded by two or three doesn't sit well. I could go with a water cooled solution but I have reservations about WC on a system of this price range as a first WC experiment.
 
shouldn't be that hot, sounds like you need some cooling solutions no matter what card you use.

my gtx 460's run a 56c full load 99% for one hour 60% fan. o.c 830mhz
 
MadOblivion said:
shouldn't be that hot, sounds like you need some cooling solutions no matter what card you use.

my gtx 460's run a 56c full load 99% for one hour 60% fan. o.c 830mhz
Click to expand...

gf104 is nothing like gf100 in terms of heat output, you should know that already
 
I second the resolution question. If you've been going this long on one 480, would the performance of 3 580's really be necessary?
 
Well,

I was thinking about a multiple display setup, the budget I've got for myself for this is ~2630 dollars, so it's probably going to be more than just one display.
Edit: So likely 5760x1080.
 
Last edited:
Well, the IRS decided to keep an extra $700 due to a miscommunication.

I've purchased, for now, a HP ZR30w 30" display and another GTX 480 SC (I have one right now.)

Reason for the change: three 30" displays running 2560x1600 even using 3xPalit's 3GB GTX580 model cards appear to lack sufficient oomph to power the displays (as noted here) in a manner that enables decent Anti-aliasing. Given the pixel density, even though, or perhaps because, it's a 30" display, isn't as good as a mobile device (~100ppi vs ~200+), AA is a must.

I'll likely bide my time and purchase two more HP ZR30w displays as time goes by until the launch of the first Kepler based video cards from nVidia (due out later in 2011.)

Was this the right decision?
 
Yes, absolutely the right decision. In my several experiences, triple SLI (and triple Crossfire) is an exercise in diminishing returns: at best, you buy yourself 30% more performance, but more often it's less and driver issues in games can be wall-punchingly annoying with 3 GPUs. Also, by sticking with another 480 instead of switching to 580s you lsaved yourself a metric shit-ton of money (likely close to enough for another zr30w) for marginally less performance.

Like you said, you still have the opportunity to upgrade later, but those dual 480s should last you a long while.

Sorry about Mr. Taxman taking another bite...:(
 
Well, from the reviews the SLI nets 2x gains in some games, I think a lot of it has to do with the utilization of SLI in the game, the actual CPU requirements of the game itself, and the multi-threaded nature of the game. Even these days with current games, they don't seem to utilize the full processor. Someone correct me if I'm wrong (using a six core processor with hyper-threading.)

Perhaps as software catches up with the changes in hardware and mass parallelism on a general-purpose scale is more prevalent, we'll see better net gains. The thing that interests me most about the new DX11 is tessellation: before they were relying on the CPU to process the scene geometry and sent it through to the GPU, which is better at it because it's massively parallel. Future games will rely more and more on this using simple models with a high level of fidelity on their displacement maps creating scenes that would require more throughput per processed frame than PCIe x 16 supports.

As this gets better and better and if nVidia can deliver on future products like Maxwell and beyond, ray-tracing might be a viable gaming solution come 2015. Mind you Maxwell should have 10 times Fermi's performance per watt, and essentially performance, ray-tracing (versus casting) increases the level of realism to a point that's difficult to describe in simple terms (a picture's worth a thousand words?)
 
Last edited:
AlexanderMorou said:
Well,

I built the system in my signature back in May of 2010, and I decided that since my original goal was a bit more horsepower for the video side of things, I'd wait until I could afford to upgrade it all the way before I finished it off.

Right now I'm using an nVidia GTX 480 Super clocked from EVGA, while it's a great card and does most of what I want, the next generation of games might cause it to choke a bit (thinking Crysis 2 will do some of this once it's out.)

Since I'm sure to get enough to hit up a 3-way SLI setup this go around, I figured while I can buy three 580s, the price/performance just doesn't warrant it (especially since even the i7 980x doesn't seem to scale too well on the third card, from the reviews I've been able to find.)

The question is, which setup makes the most sense: 3x GTX 580 or 3x GTX 570? I'm asking this primarily because I couldn't get much information associated to how well the 570 scales from one to two and then to three versus the 580. Insight appreciated.
Click to expand...


Wait for possible upcoming news on the GTX590 & grab two of those. Hopefully the scaling is fixed from the 295's, but that's what I would do. If you don't feel like waiting, the most I would do is 2 x 580's in SLi; after that, you're just throwing money away.
 
Well the issue with the current hardware is the video memory. Since a GTX 590 is a set of GPUs internally SLI'ed together through the PCB itself, the 3GB of memory on a GTX 590 isn't shared, from my understanding, the two each have 1.5 GB a piece, which doesn't solve the issue of discrete Video Ram available for the frame buffer on wide format display areas, like 3*2560x1600, that also doesn't solve the scalability issue since the inclusion of two Fermi chips likely means that the overall performance of the two would be lowered, which isn't sufficient for the resolution intended, given that I'm interested in anti-aliasing.
 
Vega said:
Except at high resolutions the crossfire bridge completely lacks the bandwidth. Confirmed by myself with quad-6970's.
Click to expand...
Ouch, that sucks. So from the looks of it, the next generation is likely the time for [extra-]wide format display gaming. Since as it is right now, it just seems impractical.
 
AlexanderMorou said:
Ouch, that sucks. So from the looks of it, the next generation is likely the time for [extra-]wide format display gaming. Since as it is right now, it just seems impractical.
Click to expand...

If your not afraid of some possible driver headache, my 3GB 580 TRI-SLI setup is working pretty well on 3x 30".
 
Vega said:
Except at high resolutions the crossfire bridge completely lacks the bandwidth. Confirmed by myself with quad-6970's.
Click to expand...

Not knowing much about the crossfire bridge, are you positive that 4 cards bridged together vs 2 physical cards (which act as 4 in total I know) would have to send as much information across that bridge? It may be that bridging 2 6990s would do better than bridging 4 6970s (I have no idea if I'm right or not, just wondering if that is possible)

Edit: And 4 6970s is sick... most people won't have that kind of bandwidth problem lol.
 
AlexanderMorou said:
Right, if EVGA decides to make a 3GB FTW edition, I might just consider it.
Click to expand...

Is there something wrong with Palit/Gainward or do you just like the EVGA step-up program? Not just any fly by night company can make their own custom PCB's as high quality as Palit has.

Jared701 said:
Not knowing much about the crossfire bridge, are you positive that 4 cards bridged together vs 2 physical cards (which act as 4 in total I know) would have to send as much information across that bridge? It may be that bridging 2 6990s would do better than bridging 4 6970s (I have no idea if I'm right or not, just wondering if that is possible)

Edit: And 4 6970s is sick... most people won't have that kind of bandwidth problem lol.
Click to expand...

One of the reasons dual 5970's worked so poorly was the crossfire bridge. Add even more bandwidth on the 6990's with the same ancient crossfire bridge design. You get the picture. ;)
 
Get Two gtx 570's and call it a day. I doubt anything will touch bring those cards down. Three way sli doesn't excel unless you are implementing sorround gaming.
 
I say stick with those two 480's until it the next batch of nvidia cards. You've already committed alot of cash to them overall, so you might as well get some value out of them methinks.
 
Vega said:
Is there something wrong with Palit/Gainward or do you just like the EVGA step-up program? Not just any fly by night company can make their own custom PCB's as high quality as Palit has.
Click to expand...

The things I like about EVGA are the community, support, step-up program, and most importantly: products.

I'm pretty sure that they're up to the challenge of developing the product, from what I understand they are made of enthusiasts and create products for enthusiasts. Take the motherboard I'm using as an example; granted, given that I was barred from 4x SLI even being an option due to the power infrastructure in my apartment being inadequate, some things you learn the hard way, by buying it and talking to support and them saying 'Check with your land-lord on the power draw allowance through your circuit breaker,' but I digress.
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top