Gadgetory

so this is going to be a quick follow-up video to my gtx 660ti content now you can see here I've got two 660ti running I've got the msi 660ti power Edition as well as galaxy's custom cooled GC card now for those of you who don't know yes you can mix vendors in sli yes you can mix different clock speeds in sli different PCBs in SLI mean this one's even running two 6-pin powers and this one's running a six and an eight different coolers in sli the thing that's important is that the GPU is the same so that means you have to have a 660ti and a 660ti no 660ti and then you know 670 or anything like that no flexibility on the nvidia side unlike the AMD side recon at 6990 with a 69 70 and tri fire this doesn't work that way so just because the 690 has the same GPU as not that I think there's a 680 around here somewhere but I'm not going to worry too much about it ah there it is right hiding as a 680 that doesn't mean you can run them in sli got to be matching GPUs also it's been suggested to me in the past that mismatched Ram configurations are ok but I haven't tried it in a long time and the last time I tried it it didn't work so there you go all right so we are going to be doing like a value analysis because people ask me about this all the time should I buy one powerful card or should I buy two less powerful cards and run them in SLI so there are some trade-offs right off the bat 2 cards is going to use more power period it's going to be noisier period because you got more fans in this case you got 4 fans versus one but which isn't to say necessarily the two of these fans is louder than one of these fans but well whatever moving on so yes power noise both worse heat is worse for having multiple cards and in 90% of cases multiple cards is bad never run two of these instead of one more powerful one that is a low-end card well well it's a gaming card but it's a low-end Gaming card and you're definitely better off getting something in the sort of more bang for the buck 250 to 350 dollar range that's where you usually find the best value so we're going to take two 660ti s versus a single 680 and find out what delivers the best performance on the best value so here's my first graph this is crisis to 1080p I'm using all my standard settings so this is like uber doubt with high res textures and all that good stuff so you can see the 660ti configuration actually well destroys the 680 however it is more expensive it's about 20% more expensive and when we actually go ahead and look at the performance differential it looks like the 60 CTI comes ahead so it's about 26% faster and 20% more expensive and at minimum fpi if you measure minimum FPS it's about 20% faster there as well so let's go ahead and you know what I'll do the graphs off camp battlefield 3 again was running at like uber settings 1080p and you can see the 660ti again just destroys it in terms of average FPS but the minimum FPS was a little bit closer so it doesn't look like as compelling a value as as it at first appears when you look at the averages however that still does show that the 660ti does present a better SLI does present a better value than a single 680 in this particular title as long as you're willing to make those trade-offs in terms of power consumption as well as noise again running a game at 1080p with ultra-high details and again we see at that minimum FPS level a 20% improvement from the 660ti sli config over the 680 we see about a 47 percent improvement in average FPS but it almost looks like Nvidia knew what they were doing when they were pricing out a single GTX 680 versus 660ti SLI because they're delivering pretty much the performance that you'd expect for the dual the dual GPU configuration versus the single one you know what here I'll just do this last one on okay no I won't do this on camera I need to ends and there's Metro 2033 where we actually see about a 30% improvement in both minimum and average FPS so this is the clear winner so what's neat about this cross-section of games is that these are all well they're all shooters they're all demanding which you're to isn't a shooter actually they're all demanding and they all demonstrate that the 660ti not only scales consistently in sli but presents a compelling value versus buying a single higher in GPU that is to say that that's not to say though that it's necessarily the better option because two of these is 600 bucks one of these is 500 bucks and for that 20% improvement you are trading off extra heat and extra power consumption so it's up to you personally I think SLI cards look more bling-bling and yeah I think that's probably all else that is got going for it but remember guys when you're trying to figure out if a dual GPU configuration makes sense you just want to look at performance per dollar that's pretty much the only factor here because they've now got the same features they both support three plus one videos out even when you add another card if you're running an sli you can only plug the you can only plug in three plus one in sli and this one also supports three plus one off of a single card you also want to remember that things like memory configurations are important so when you're running two cards in SLI to two gig cards does not equal four gigs of video memory okay so they both have to share the frame buffer which means that you still only get effectively two kicks so bear that in mind as well so I know this really didn't have a clear-cut conclusion because basically performance per dollar they're very very similar just comes down to do you want a little bit more performance or do you not on a little bit more performance thanks for checking out this episode of Linus tech tips and don't forget to subscribe for more unboxings reviews and other computer videos