Gadgetory

welcome to the duel gtx 980 vs triple gtx970 showdown both of these solutions cost over $1,000 for the video cards alone and bring a monstrous amount of gaming horsepower to the table but only one can be victorious today stay tuned for the stunning conclusion and also don't miss our journey back to the parking lot where it all started for an outdoor unboxing of the fantex and thew evolve old-school ltte style from December 13th to 20th 2014 you can save on select Intel CPU Schnucks and SSDs with special holiday rebates from select retailers click now to learn more now I often get miss quoted as saying that you shouldn't buy two graphics cards if there's a more powerful single GPU option available but and we've talked a fair bit about SLI scaling recently including in this video right here there is one exception to this rule that almost always holds true the second tier the one just under the flagship graphics card is usually based on the same processing core is cut down in a way that doesn't affect performance too dramatically it overclocks like that and is much less expensive so if you can stretch your budget to of those sometimes doesn't cost much more than one flagship card because they don't carry that best of the best price premium but Linus what if one top of the line or even two second fiddle graphics cards just isn't enough GPU for me well my first response to that would be why the heck not that's an awful lot of video card power and my second response would be I'm just kidding I know you can never have enough video guard power especially if you want a game at 4k or at very high frame rates that's just messing with you guys so let's take a look at the contenders today and then he has top-of-the-line uber card du jour is the GTX 980 it features a base clock of 11:26 megahertz a boost clock of 12 16 megahertz 4 gigs of GPU memory clock seven gigahertz and 2048 CUDA cores sounds awesome right well it should because it costs over five hundred and fifty dollars each to pick up one of these puppies and just over $1,100 for the two of them that you'll need to take advantage of that rog swift 1440p 144 Hertz monitor or that brand-new 4k 60 Hertz gaming monitor if you want to play the latest triple-a titles but maybe there's another way the GTX 970 by comparison is clocked at 10 50 megahertz on the core has a boost clock of 1178 megahertz also features four gigs of GPU memory clocked at 7 gigahertz and has 16,000 64 cuda cores less than the GTX 980 but it's not exactly a slouch either and it weighs in at only 340 dollars meaning that three of these would actually cost less then 2 GTX 980 s so let's start with the raw FPS data here shall we across-the-board average frame rates were really close between our two test configurations on our core i7 5960 x extreme edition test platform tomb raider continues to be the poster child for multi-gpu gaming with about a 20% performance advantage at a 10 percent lower cost for the 3-way setup booyah Far Cry 3 and Crysis 3 tell a different story however both shows solid results for the triple config if we just look at the charts but while sitting in front of them at 1440p was fine so you high refresh rate gamers would be happy with this config at 4k the stuttering and hitching was unbearable with three graphics cards and dual 90s delivered a much smoother gaming experience the rest of our games dirt showdown Middle Earth shadow of Mordor and BioShock Infinite didn't have noticeable hitching or stuttering but also didn't demonstrate the same performance advantage as Tomb Raider for our three-way configuration something I would have had to see if I was going to recommend 3-way SLI for folks who play more than just the games that happen to run really really well on it especially when you consider that triple graphics card configuration has other disadvantages as well in gain power consumption is actually closer than I expected probably because the utilization of the third GPU is never going to be as much as the second which is never as much as the first so this was basically a draw but both the temperatures at which our cards were running and the experience of sitting there next to them were a little bit uncomfortable for me our 970 rig was much louder and especially the middle sandwiched GPU ran much hotter than either of our better space 9 ATS and that's with a fan blowing directly over top of them not to mention that two cards will take up fewer of the available expansion slots on your motherboard that you might like to use for PCI Express SSDs sound cards or other fancy new functionality for your system as it becomes available so its conclusion time for gaming I just don't think the added bang for the buck of the three-way config of second-tier cards compensates whoops for the disadvantages associated with this kind of a setup you could possibly make an argument for it if you were planning to use your system for things other than gaming like 3d rendering or cryptocurrency mining or something like that but frankly even then the higher clock speed an additional cuda cores of the 1980s means that unless the nine 70s are scaling nearly perfectly the performance is going to be similar anyhow and by the time you're spending a thousand dollars on GPUs what's another hundred bucks to get a much more elegant solution so that's all there is really to it this was a fun experiment but the conclusion didn't shake the foundations of the pre-existing knowledge we had on the topic it just gave us a clearer understanding of what folks who want to run at 2560 by 1440 144 Hertz or 4k 60 Hertz need to power their setups speaking of clearer understanding we have a new sponsor online as tech tips that helps you better understand the guts of all your electronic devices iFixit you may know I fix it from there tear downs of a multitude of gadgets like their phones like the iMac retina 5k their guide for which I actually followed to create my upcome iMac 5k internals upgrade video but what you may not know about them is that they also have a full lineup of professional electronics tools the cornerstone of their tool lineup is the pro Tech tool kit which includes seven tools to assist you with any mod or malfunction on one of your little electronic gizmos the Pro Tech tool kit includes a 54 bit driver kit which features standard specialty and security bits it's got ESD safe precision tweezers an anti-static wrist strap or you can wear it on your ankle like I do prying a bunch of prime tools in both nylon and metal sputters I never leave home without my Pro Tech tool kit as I can always find a use for it when I'm working with electronics and you can purchase the kid over at ifixit.com slash Linus where it's available for only sixty four ninety-five which by the way includes a lifetime warranty I actually didn't know that but wait if you use our offer code Linus you can actually save ten bucks on the Pro Tech tool kit or any other purchase over fifty bucks so if I fix it you can fix it yourself and if you guys don't believe this obviously written by Nick so like very strong endorsement if I fix it it's actually all true in this case I bought my my pro Tech tool kit myself I paid my own real money for it over a year ago and it's just a fluke that they advertise with us now I absolutely love my kit and they're great guys over there so I think that's pretty much it guys like the video if you liked it dislike it if you just like to leave a comment if your feelings more complicated than this also check out the link in the video description to support us you can buy a cool t-shirt like this one give us a monthly contribution or change our amazon bookmark to earn with our affiliate coats we got a small kickback whenever you buy new graphics cards or whatever else the case may be thanks again for watching and as always don't forget to subscribe