Soldato
To be honest you can get a 580 for much less than £400 - around £360 to be fair but for the resolution and for the increased performance you are going to get at that res 2 x 6950 for just under £400 if you go for todays offer.
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did not realise you could get the gtx for that price.. and you would then not have the possible problems of multi gpu
Snakegb, please fix your signature. It's 4 lines max.
I don't think a 590 would be that interesting for your purposes. HardOCP's recent comparison of 580 SLI vs. 6970 CF showed that at your res there are memory issues with 1.5Gb vram, which is all that a 590 will have (2x1.5Gb).
The card to go for at the res, around the £400 mark, is surely the Palit 3Gb 580. A second one in a year's time would give it a long life, too.
Seeing as OP has mentioned Rift i would reccomend staying well clear of AMD, i have a I7 920 with a coulpled Gigabyte 460 SOC and at 1920x1200 it flies a frend of mine has same card with a Q6600 and he can run 1920x1080 with 3d on, both with settings all maxed, my main PC with 980x and AMD 5970 at the same 1920x1200 max on everything is lucky to get above 10, rift heaverly favours nvidia, not 100% on this but i believe rift is very physx Heavy, i will soon be didtching my 5970 for either the 3gig palit or 590GTX unsure which would be better option with 3d surround in mind. But its likeley to be either 3x580 palits W/C or 1/2 590's W/C depending what fits best.
P.S Both mine and mates 460 are Oc'd to 940/1200
I don't think a 590 would be that interesting for your purposes. HardOCP's recent comparison of 580 SLI vs. 6970 CF showed that at your res there are memory issues with 1.5Gb vram, which is all that a 590 will have (2x1.5Gb).
The card to go for at the res, around the £400 mark, is surely the Palit 3Gb 580. A second one in a year's time would give it a long life, too.
lol all interesting stuff but I +1 with the above.
Seeing as OP has mentioned Rift i would reccomend staying well clear of AMD, i have a I7 920 with a coulpled Gigabyte 460 SOC and at 1920x1200 it flies a frend of mine has same card with a Q6600 and he can run 1920x1080 with 3d on, both with settings all maxed, my main PC with 980x and AMD 5970 at the same 1920x1200 max on everything is lucky to get above 10, rift heaverly favours nvidia, not 100% on this but i believe rift is very physx Heavy, i will soon be didtching my 5970 for either the 3gig palit or 590GTX unsure which would be better option with 3d surround in mind. But its likeley to be either 3x580 palits W/C or 1/2 590's W/C depending what fits best.
P.S Both mine and mates 460 are Oc'd to 940/1200
ATi cards perform fantastically well until DX11 and tessellation are considered then suddenly all is quiet
Well i can defenetly say ive got a good CPU and memorey, [email protected] and 6 gig corsair dominator, maybe its something with the 5 series specificaly then, but theres about 6 of us on ati cards at the moment going to rift and none of us are on ultra as it flops below 30 far to often to be playable, id still go nvidia if playin rift though, if i can smash the fps i get from a 460 over my 5970 at 1000/1400 to me the choice would be to stick with nvidia, though if what you say is true then maybe the 6 series is worth a shot, but as OP wants to use nvidia id still reccomend a 580 with his £400.
You obviously didn't look at the review quoted, which shows 6970 CF beating 580 SLI, never mind 480, in the tesselation/DX11 heavy unigine test.
Yes the 6970 CF performs well in the above test, until Metro 2033.
They perform better than I have seen reviewed elsewhere.
2 x 6950s are not guaranteed to unlock to 6970s and the 6970s are £250 each on OCUK: http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=GX-148-OK&groupid=701&catid=56&subcat=1752
If you can unlock 2 x 6950s that would indeed look like the best punch for the £ at the moment. (at OPs massive resolution)
FYI I'm not, I go with either brand. Both brands have served me well over the years. It's just I fail to see how spending 50% more for less performance is common sense?