Gadgetory

now this video is going to be a bit of a look at SLI scaling on the gtx 550 ti now sli has been a big story for nvidia since they first released it with the 6800 series however not every not every card necessarily makes sense to run in sli so i've always been of the mind that if there is a better card than the one that you have that is as good as two of the one that you have running in sli you're probably usually better off to go with the single more powerful card versus the two slower weaker cards running in sli so I wanted to take a quick snapshot of some DirectX 11 titles so the ones that I've gone with our Hawks to Lost Planet 2 and metro 2033 and I compared four different scenarios so I compared a single gtx 550 ti cyclone 2 so that is a slightly overclocked card I compared that running an SLI with a gtx 550 ti reference card i compared a gtx 560 Twin Frozr 2 so once again this is a slightly overclocked card but since neither of these carry a price premium over the reference cards I see no reason to necessarily bench with reference cards and the last one that I included was the gtx 570 so the reason i've gone this route is that the cost of a single 550 ti is well significantly lower than anything else on the table however the cost of two of them together actually lends somewhere in between a 560 and a 570 s so that's why i wanted to test the single GPUs that are available on either side of the price bracket of this dual GPU solution now the upgrading guys will say well yeah but what if I wanted to upgrade to one later then my response would be well then what you really should have done was saved a couple extra bucks to buy something else in the first place if you need more performance than buy something with more performance so here we go why don't we have a look at the benchmarks that I was able to run here and we'll start with - so in Hawke's - you can see that the gtx 550 ti at about 85 frames per second actually scales incredibly well in this particular game so that's like 90% scaling or so and actually performs right exactly where it's supposed to be in between the 560 TI and the 570 however even this is an ideal scenario an ideal scenario has the 550 ti performing about where it should in terms of the pricing of this solution so you're gonna see that the problem with SLI is that it doesn't always scale in an ideal fashion so right here our 550 performs about where it should with respect to a 560 and even a 570 but the SLI solution while costing more than a 560 and consuming more power than a single 560 actually doesn't even perform as well and remember the 550 ti SLI solution is about as expensive as in between these two so really it should be right in between them it should be around 50 fps but it's uh it's about 10 to 12 percent slower than that in Lost Planet 2 and now let's have a look at the last one that I ran here which is a metro 2033 benchmark so here I've got it running at normal quality with tessellation on and 0 times anti-aliasing all of these benchmarks are at 1920 by 1200 by the way so you can see the 550 ti is right here 550 ti SLI really doesn't scale that well compared to where it should be which is around 90 fps so once again we're looking at like a 20 percent performance Delta difference between where it should be to justify the price versus where it is when it doesn't scale quite as well as it could so I basically the conclusion of this is that the 550 ti if you do buy one and you find yourself needing some more performance yes you can get additional performance and you can go from what I would consider basic playable to very very playable and a demanding game like metro 2033 at full HD resolution however if you know you need the performance you're going to be playing demanding game at HD resolution then just get a 560 TI do yourself a favor and buy the right card in the first place because even though once in a while and this is sort of the exception not the rule the 550 ti SLI set up will outperform a 560 ti you're going to get a more consistent overall experience with a single more powerful card versus two more entry-level cards running in tandem so thanks for checking out this video on Linus tech tips don't forget to subscribe and for more right for more unboxings reviews and other computer videos