gpu help

[Tenacity]

I built my rig around 5 years ago, and it's long past time to upgrade the guts. It was built with a single evga GeForce gtx 260 graphics card. My question is: would I get better performance for minimum expenditure by getting another gtx 260 and SLI'ing them together, or by upgrading to a newer, single card?

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[evanz]

depends if you got the ram memory type size and speed to back 2 cards up

[KaiserDietz]

Actually, contrary to what evanz says, your ram is completely separate. GPUs have their own memory and so do not require any information to go through the regular RAM. In addition, RAM speed offers very little performance increase, as their CAS Latency usually negates any gains from extra mhz

As far as SLI goes, I wouldn't, as it is old hardware and likely does not support most new games to the full extent of their abilities. In addition, two GPUs are noiser, consume more power, and are more difficult to cool. With the money you save on the power bill buy a better card.

What's your budget, I can make a suggestion if you'd like.

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[evanz]

ok try playing a decent game with a good card but with older memory types and watch the bottle necking, ram feeds cpu, cpu feeds gfx card

[KaiserDietz]

? I still use 5 year old DDR3 memory on my rig with an R9 280X and it performs fine on ultra. The only bottlenecking I would expect is from an old CPU maybe. Even with only 1333 mhz installed I get 60 + framerate.



You'll see from this, for gaming a high memory clock offers negligible performance gains. The architecture hasn't changed at all in the past 5 years, so as long he is using ddr3, he should be golden.

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[evanz]

thats what im saying, the ram, cpu need to match in a way what the gfx card could max at, if the ram and cpu, dont match and work together to support the gfx card, there will be bottle necking

e.g. in my old comp, with my overclocked 560ti, i had 4 gig ddr2, intel q6600, and it was terrible, in bf3 i would get stuttering and about 40-60 fps. in my new one with quad core 4.40x4 and 8 gig overclocked corsair ram, with my 560ti, i get regular 100-120 fps

[Tenacity]

Here's my other system info:


Intel Core i7 860 @ 2.8GHz 8M LGA1156
Corsair 4GB DDR3 PC12800 1600MHz (2x2gb) Class 9
Seagate 1TB Serial ATA HD
LG 22x DVDRW IDE OEM
Cooler Master Silent Pro M850 Modular 850W PSU
Gigabyte P55A-UD3 Motherboard

and the GPU:
EVGA GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 896MB PCIe

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[KozmoMan]

You should upgrade it will be less hassle and better price for performance.

[KaiserDietz]

I've looked at your motherboard specs. Swap graphics cards is the only option if you want to continue to use this board, because of this

PCI 2.0x16 1

This means only one graphics card. Give me a budget and what kind of games you want to play and I'll make a suggestion.

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[Tenacity]

That's odd, because I've got two PCI slots for cards to fit into...

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