780 GTX SLI Performance?

[CodeguruX]

Been looking at tom's hardware and I'm not sure if I'm seeing any benchmarks for cards in SLI mode. How do the low end 780gtx 3gb in SLI mode compare to a single one?...

 

[rgallant]

http://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/gtx_780_ti_sli_geforce_review,14.html
You could look at this review , has 780sli in there .

 

[Piklar]

How do the low end 780gtx 3gb in SLI mode compare to a single one?...

By low end I'm guessing you mean reference 780s? There's nothing low end about them! . Compared to a single card your looking at close to double the performance as they scale nicely. Out of the box SLI 780s offer the best user experience around right now for the $..

 

[RussianSensation]

By low end I'm guessing you mean reference 780s? There's nothing low end about them! . Compared to a single card your looking at close to double the performance as they scale nicely. Out of the box SLI 780s offer the best user experience around right now for the $..

Not even close. I think you meant the best performance from 2 single GPU cards. Otherwise, R9 290 in CF or Tri-Fire, Gigabyte Windforce GTX780 Ghz Edition SLI (or nearly Tri-SLI) all offer superior price/performance than 780Ti SLI. At higher resolutions/4K, GTX780TI SLI can't provide superior gaming experience vs. 290X CF without overclocking.

Without overclocking, the 780Ti is one of the most overpriced cards out right now, along with R9 290X. You can also buy almost 3x EVGA Classified 780s for the price of 2 780Tis and the former setup would beat the latter without much problems.

GameGPU has a review of GTX780 SLI OC vs. GTX780 Ti SLI OC

It's very obvious from that review that 780Ti SLI is not worth $400 more over 780s. 3x EVGA 780 Classified OC vs. 2x GTX780Ti OC would be a slaughter.

I can't see 20nm GPUs being more than 1 year away. I would get 2 good after-market 780s, save $450+ and upgrade to 2x 20nm cards next year.

 

[Piklar]

Not even close. I think you meant the best performance from 2 single GPU cards. Otherwise, R9 290 in CF or Tri-Fire, Gigabyte Windforce GTX780 Ghz Edition SLI (or nearly Tri-SLI) all offer superior price/performance than 780Ti SLI. At higher resolutions/4K, GTX780TI SLI can't provide superior gaming experience vs. 290X CF without overclocking.

Without overclocking, the 780Ti is one of the most overpriced cards out right now, along with R9 290X. You can also buy almost 3x EVGA Classified 780s for the price of 2 780Tis and the former setup would beat the latter without much problems.

GameGPU has a review of GTX780 SLI OC vs. GTX780 Ti SLI OC

It's very obvious from that review that 780Ti SLI is not worth $400 more over 780s. 3x EVGA 780 Classified OC vs. 2x GTX780Ti OC would be a slaughter.

I can't see 20nm GPUs being more than 1 year away. I would get 2 good after-market 780s, save $450+ and upgrade to 2x 20nm cards next year.

Perhaps my wording was a little vague, I was referring to SLI 780s offering the best "USER" experience rather than price/performance. Recently I built a rig for a customer with Crossfire 290xs and have been playing about with it over the weekend, its summer here in NZ now so it is warm but I noticed the performance of crossfire 290x fall to the point where I could have been gaming on my old sli 670 build except it wasn't as smooth as after an hour of BF4 they started to throttle the clocks back to stay at 94C , I cranked up the fans to 75% and damn!! my wife came in scowling at the violation to her quiet time and made me shut the door, with the door closed and just windows open no joke my man cave must have heated up by 10C with the amount of heat these things were putting out! These cards were s killing me!.. well dehydrating me so "killing me softly"..
Thanks to Karlitoses amazing rig I was eyeing up a switch to 290x but after the weekend I would take 780s any day as there's no way Id want a pair of 290s in my house in their current form unless I used our water cylinder to cool them and use the cards to heat our water..

 

[darkfalz]

I'm got my eye on the 790 GTX when it is released

 

[Face2Face]

Perhaps my wording was a little vague, I was referring to SLI 780s offering the best "USER" experience rather than price/performance. Recently I built a rig for a customer with Crossfire 290xs and have been playing about with it over the weekend, its summer here in NZ now so it is warm but I noticed the performance of crossfire 290x fall to the point where I could have been gaming on my old sli 670 build except it wasn't as smooth as after an hour of BF4 they started to throttle the clocks back to stay at 94C , I cranked up the fans to 75% and damn!! my wife came in scowling at the violation to her quiet time and made me shut the door, with the door closed and just windows open no joke my man cave must have heated up by 10C with the amount of heat these things were putting out! These cards were s killing me!.. well dehydrating me so "killing me softly"..
Thanks to Karlitoses amazing rig I was eyeing up a switch to 290x but after the weekend I would take 780s any day as there's no way Id want a pair of 290s in my house in their current form unless I used our water cylinder to cool them and use the cards to heat our water..

This is why I don't miss my 7950's in Crossfire. My GTX 780 barely puts out any heat.. I am loving it.

 

[Aithos]

Not even close. I think you meant the best performance from 2 single GPU cards. Otherwise, R9 290 in CF or Tri-Fire, Gigabyte Windforce GTX780 Ghz Edition SLI (or nearly Tri-SLI) all offer superior price/performance than 780Ti SLI. At higher resolutions/4K, GTX780TI SLI can't provide superior gaming experience vs. 290X CF without overclocking.

Without overclocking, the 780Ti is one of the most overpriced cards out right now, along with R9 290X. You can also buy almost 3x EVGA Classified 780s for the price of 2 780Tis and the former setup would beat the latter without much problems.

GameGPU has a review of GTX780 SLI OC vs. GTX780 Ti SLI OC

It's very obvious from that review that 780Ti SLI is not worth $400 more over 780s. 3x EVGA 780 Classified OC vs. 2x GTX780Ti OC would be a slaughter.

I can't see 20nm GPUs being more than 1 year away. I would get 2 good after-market 780s, save $450+ and upgrade to 2x 20nm cards next year.

I don't know why you're talking about the 780ti, he never mentioned that card at all. He said the 780 in SLI is the best user experience for the money and he's right. As far as I'm concerned he isn't talking about the reference model specifically, he's talking about that card in general. As for performance, two 780s that have been OCed will beat two 290s pretty easily for a couple reasons:

1) SLI scales better than CF
2) the NVIDIA cards run much cooler and don't throttle

As for which card to get, if you're going to run SLI don't go with open air coolers, go with the Titan style blower. Unless you have a very, very high air flow case your top card is going to choke on the heat from the bottom card and that will limit your OC significantly because the cards sync to the slower speed in SLI when you OC.

I would look at the EVGA overclocked cards with the reference cooler if I was the OP and call it good. The 780ti is a great card too, if you have a couple hundred bucks extra you might as well grab it, but if you're on a budget it isn't the sweet spot for price/performance. I went with 2 EVGA 780ti superclocked cards and overclocked a bit further myself, but when you're looking at $3k+ for a build an extra few hundred dollars is less than 7% price premium and a bigger than 7% gain in performance.

People seem to forget that all you need to get out of a GPU upgrade is more performance than your build price percentage goes up. Comparing performance vs price on *ONLY* the GPU is stupid, it's total system cost that matters. IE: most of your system performance comes from CPU/GPU, so if you can trim the fat in the rest of your build and get the *best* components on those two you'll see a bigger performance jump as a total system than if you go with the purely price/performance per slot components.

Edit: Also, 3x 780 Classified is at least $250 more than 2 780ti and the scaling from 2 card SLI to 3 card SLI is really bad. I would take two overclocked 780ti over three 780 classified any day of the week and twice on sunday.

 

[RussianSensation]

I cranked up the fans to 75% and damn!! my wife came in scowling at the violation to her quiet time and made me shut the door, with the door closed and just windows open no joke my man cave must have heated up by 10C with the amount of heat these things were putting out! These cards were s killing me!.. well dehydrating me so "killing me softly"..

The reason your room heated up so much is because you closed the door. If you had 780s in SLI or 290s in CF and left the room open, the temperature in the room would be very similar since they both consume a similar amount of power. If one card runs at 50*C and another at 95*C but they use a similar amount of power, the temperature rise in the room would be the same. It doesn't matter at all what temperature the GPU runs at since that's not what determines the temperature rise in you room.

R9 290 and 780 use a very similar amount of power in games.

This is why I don't miss my 7950's in Crossfire. My GTX 780 barely puts out any heat.. I am loving it.

You must be comparing 7950s max overclocked to 1.2-1.3Ghz then. Otherwise, 2x 7950 use less than 60W more power than 780 which is immaterial. At the same time though if you had your 7950 overclocked to 1.2ghz in CF, I can't see how a single 780 can even hope to keep up.

I don't know why you're talking about the 780ti, he never mentioned that card at all. He said the 780 in SLI is the best user experience for the money and he's right.

I am pretty sure he first mentioned 780Ti SLI because I would have never even started talking about 3x 780s vs. 2 780Tis as a better alternative or recommending the much more cost effective Gigabyte 780 Ghz Edition. I am pretty sure he edited his post. If he mentioned 780 SLI, I wouldn't have disagreed as I think it's an gppd setup for the $ before after-market R9 290s come out.

1) SLI scales better than CF

Not really. Is that why it takes 780TI SLI to keep up with 290X CF at 4K and multi-monitor gaming and why 780 SLI can't beat R9 290 CF? If you looked at recent reviews, there is no evidence at all that SLI works better than CF when it comes to 780 SLI vs. R9 290 CF. In fact, CF tends to scale better. If you were talking about CF issues on 4K and Eyefinity for HD7900 series, I would agree.

There are plenty of examples of recently released games where CF works out of the box and SLI doesn't.
http://gamegpu.ru/images/remote/htt...tion-Renegade_X_Black_Dawn-test-rxbd_2560.jpg

You are making a sweeping generalization.

2) the NVIDIA cards run m uch cooler and don't throttle

You must be talking about running R9 290X in quiet mode, yet your statement is implicit in general for all NV vs. AMD cards. R9 290 doesn't throttle if you set a manual fan curve and neither do any of the other 5870/6970/7970 cards.

Also, you statement that "NV cards run much cooler" is ambiguous at best. How cool a card runs is largely determined by the combination of the cooler and its power usage. Slap an Accelero on an R9 290X or GTX480 and temperatures will drop to mid 60s.

As for which card to get, if you're going to run SLI don't go with open air coolers, go with the Titan style blower. Unless you have a very, very high air flow case your top card is going to choke on the heat from the bottom card and that will limit your OC significantly because the cards sync to the slower speed in SLI when you OC.

False. You do not need an uber case to achieve high airflow. A $100 case and a motherboard with 3 slot spacing would work perfectly. 2 Asus DCUII 780s or 2x Gigabyte Windforce 3x 780s would offer superior temperatures, noise levels, overclocks than 2 reference 780s in this style case (2 intake fans, 1 rear exhaust fan and a solid top exhaust fan).

Reference blower coolers cannot compete in a modern case in SLI. People who keep saying they do keep perpetuating the myth of blowers repeated from the 90s.

A max overclocked Asus DCUII 780 still runs 10db quieter than a reference 780.

People seem to forget that all you need to get out of a GPU upgrade is more performance than your build price percentage goes up. Comparing performance vs price on *ONLY* the GPU is stupid, it's total system cost that matters.

No one is comparing GPUs in isolation either. It's implicit that even if you compare 780Ti SLI in total with system cost, it's still a terrible value vs. Giga 780 Ghz Editions in SLI based on the simple fact that GPUs have such a short shelf life. We are way past the 2nd half of 28nm generation. With 20nm cards about 12-14 months away, spending $1,400 on a GPU setup that is only 10% faster than 780SLI and will get beaten by 2x $399 20nm cards in 12-14 months is not wise unless you make so much $ that price is not a factor. If price is not a factor, why would you be asking for advice when building a new rig? You'd just buy 3 780 Tis or 4 Titans with a 4960X, etc.

Edit: Also, 3x 780 Classified is at least $250 more than 2 780ti and the scaling from 2 card SLI to 3 card SLI is really bad. I would take two overclocked 780ti over three 780 classified any day of the week and twice on sunday.

$250 more but EVGA Classies overclock to 1.3-1.35ghz consistently, something that can't be said of 780TI. Once you account for the fact that at 1.25Ghz a 780Ti SLI is only 10-12% faster than 1.15Ghz oveclocked 780Ti SLI (GameGPU review), it's evident that even if scaling is just 50% on the 3rd EVGA Classy card, it will cream 780 TI SLI setup.

Benchmarks already show that 780Ti SLI oc is not worth it over 780 SLI oc. So how can 3x GTX780 Tri-SLI OC not destroy 780Ti oc SLI? They would unless we are talking about CoH2 or some game with broken SLI scaling. :thumbsup:

And if you really want to talk about value, R9 290 in Tri-fire will pay for itself with litecoin mining in less than 1.5 months and after have no problems beating 780Ti SLI. So, if you went there talking about performance/$, then NV isn't even an option if the OP doesn't mind setting up LTC.

 

[Face2Face]

You must be comparing 7950s max overclocked to 1.2-1.3Ghz then. Otherwise, 2x 7950 use less than 60W more power than 780 which is immaterial. At the same time though if you had your 7950 overclocked to 1.2ghz in CF, I can't see how a single 780 can even hope to keep up.

Nope, that was running both cards @ 1Ghz in crossfire. I am not joking when I say that after 30-60 minutes of gaming I would actually start to sweat. The amount of heat coming out of my system was getting to be unbearable. Overclocked any higher it became much worse, just look at the consumption.

7950's in CFX

Clocks @ 1150/1650 with 1.150v and a Power Limit of 20% on both cards
Max draw of 693w at the wall = 589w used by the PSU.

Jumped the clocks to 1200/1700 with 1.188v and a power limit of 20% on both cards
Max draw 827w at the wall = 702w used by the PSU.

Both of my cards were high Asic's (89%) and were on 7970 Ref boards.

I have yet to put the GTX 780 on the good old killawatt, but I will soon.

 

[Aithos]

The reason your room heated up so much is because you closed the door. If you had 780s in SLI or 290s in CF and left the room open, the temperature in the room would be very similar since they both consume a similar amount of power. If one card runs at 50*C and another at 95*C but they use a similar amount of power, the temperature rise in the room would be the same. It doesn't matter at all what temperature the GPU runs at since that's not what determines the temperature rise in you room.

R9 290 and 780 use a very similar amount of power in games.

This is just plain false. Heat generated is related to how much power is used (the more power used the more heat is generated), but there is no correlation to how much heat the card generates. The chips are different die sizes, have different internals (and heat spreaders) and different cooling solutions. Just because two cards use similar amounts of power do not mean they generate the same amount of heat. You cannot deny that 780s and 780ti's run at < 82 degrees and don't go above that even when overclocked. Even running Uber mode (which is more than twice as loud in real world sound) the AMD cards run over 90 degrees.

That's why I made the throttling comment, because even with annoyingly loud fan speeds they still hit 90+ and throttle sometimes. The reason a 290 can keep up with a 290x is because they changed the bios to default to a higher fan speed after the heat debacle of the 290x launch.

I am pretty sure he first mentioned 780Ti SLI because I would have never even started talking about 3x 780s vs. 2 780Tis as a better alternative or recommending the much more cost effective Gigabyte 780 Ghz Edition. I am pretty sure he edited his post. If he mentioned 780 SLI, I wouldn't have disagreed as I think it's an gppd setup for the $ before after-market R9 290s come out.

If he edited it I didn't see it. All I saw was you quoting his post that had no mention of the 780ti...

Not really. Is that why it takes 780TI SLI to keep up with 290X CF at 4K and multi-monitor gaming and why 780 SLI can't beat R9 290 CF? If you looked at recent reviews, there is no evidence at all that SLI works better than CF when it comes to 780 SLI vs. R9 290 CF. In fact, CF tends to scale better. If you were talking about CF issues on 4K and Eyefinity for HD7900 series, I would agree.

Nope. The reason it takes a 780ti to keep up with 290x is because NVIDIA had awful 4k and multi-monitor drivers for their high end setup. The reviews stated the issue was acknowledged and being addressed. 4k is also hugely bottlenecked at this point so it doesn't really matter what you throw at it, nothing runs 60fps. I care about 1080p and 1440p. Most gamers run at 1080p and the future is 1440p, not 4k. There isn't even native 1440p content...it's all upscaled. It will be over 5 years before a game engine is updated to render in 4k and game companies start producing native 4k content. Mention 4k to me when that happens, until then it's meaningless.

You must be talking about running R9 290X in quiet mode, yet your statement is implicit in general for all NV vs. AMD cards. R9 290 doesn't throttle if you set a manual fan curve and neither do any of the other 5870/6970/7970 cards.

If you want your cards to be more than twice as loud and sound like an aircraft taking off, feel free. I'd rather quiet performance, thanks. My dual 780ti system is whisper quiet, you can't even hear it from a couple feet away.

Also, you statement that "NV cards run much cooler" is ambiguous at best. How cool a card runs is largely determined by the combination of the cooler and its power usage. Slap an Accelero on an R9 290X or GTX480 and temperatures will drop to mid 60s.

There is nothing ambiguous about it. The NVIDIA cards run at 80~ degrees, the new AMD cards run 90-95~ degrees. I'm not putting a custom cooling solution or a water block on a card just to make it reasonably cool. That's extra money for no better performance.

False. You do not need an uber case to achieve high airflow. A $100 case and a motherboard with 3 slot spacing would work perfectly. 2 Asus DCUII 780s or 2x Gigabyte Windforce 3x 780s would offer superior temperatures, noise levels, overclocks than 2 reference 780s in this style case (2 intake fans, 1 rear exhaust fan and a solid top exhaust fan).

You misunderstand what I'm saying. I'm not saying you need an uber case to keep dual gpu temps reasonable. I'm saying that if you overclock your cards sync their speeds to the lower of the two. So if your top card is hotter (it always will be) then you don't want an open air (ACX or windforce) cooler because all that heat from the bottom card will make the top card even hotter. If you top card is 10 degrees hotter it won't overclock as far, that means your bottom card will match the lower speed. SLI overclocks are MATCHED. You can't have one running at 1250 and one at 1150, it doesn't work that way.

So if you intend to go SLI, you get blower (titan) coolers so the hot air is vented outside the case. That will keep the two cards temps closer together and allow you to overclock higher. It also allows you to achieve positive airflow easier because you don't have video cards mucking up your airflow by venting air in a weird direction. I have a Corsair 750D and even though it's not a very good case for airflow my temps are very low even with a 4770k and two 780ti's overclocked.

Reference blower coolers cannot compete in a modern case in SLI. People who keep saying they do keep perpetuating the myth of blowers repeated from the 90s.

Wrong again. They do compete, I have a setup to prove it. AMD blower coolers can't compete because they suck. The NVIDIA Titan coolers are robust and work very well, there have been several reviews and benchmarks showing temps with reference coolers to be better for SLI. I don't have any links handy but if you google it I'm sure you can find some.

$250 more but EVGA Classies overclock to 1.3-1.35ghz consistently, something that can't be said of 780TI. Once you account for the fact that at 1.25Ghz a 780Ti SLI is only 10-12% faster than 1.15Ghz oveclocked 780Ti SLI (GameGPU review), it's evident that even if scaling is just 50% on the 3rd EVGA Classy card, it will cream 780 TI SLI setup.

First of all, they don't all clock to 1.3-1.35. You need a golden chip to go over 1.3, it's a safer comparison to say the classified will clock to 1.25. Your logic is also flawed for a couple reasons: 1) the 780ti will overclock just as well as the 780. If you want to look at the classified, wait until the 780ti classified hits. The 780ti at 1250 is considerably faster than a 780 @ 1250, to the tune of 20% because of the CUDA cores...and that's not even counting the faster memory speeds.

When you combine that with the fact that scaling on the third card isn't very good, I'll take two overclocked 780ti's over 3 780's any day. Also, don't forget, adding a third card adds considerably more heat to the case, so you're not going to get 3 780 classified cards clocked to 1.3...since they sync to the lowest overclock you'd be lucky to even hit 1.25. I'm not talking about professional benchmarkers who get engineering samples either, I'm talking about Joe Schmo consumer with 3 retail cards. Feel free to buy 3 780s and I'll gladly run my system vs your's and we'll see who comes out ahead.

Benchmarks already show that 780Ti SLI oc is not worth it over 780 SLI oc. So how can 3x GTX780 Tri-SLI OC not destroy 780Ti oc SLI? They would unless we are talking about CoH2 or some game with broken SLI scaling. :thumbsup:

And what benchmarks are these? Are you talking about meaningless 4k ones again? Every benchmark I've seen shows that the 780ti crushes the 780, the 290x and the Titan at everything but compute...and that's because it's neutered intentionally for that. In SLI it's an even bigger performance gap.

And if you really want to talk about value, R9 290 in Tri-fire will pay for itself with litecoin mining in less than 1.5 months and after have no problems beating 780Ti SLI. So, if you went there talking about performance/$, then NV isn't even an option if the OP doesn't mind setting up LTC.

I don't litecoin or bitcoin mine, I don't care to waste my bandwith, my electricity or my time on that [redacted]. I have a real job, that makes me real money. If you're really serious about making money with "coin farming" buy a server and pro cards and go to town, none of this amateur maybe it will work crap. If you were able to easily, no problem, 100% guaranteed make money back then everyone would do it. But you can't, it isn't guaranteed and most people don't even make money doing it.

You're looking at all the wrong things and drawing the wrong conclusions. I've made my recomendations and I will stick by them. I still think if you're spending $3-4k on a system then jumping from $550-$700 is nothing and I'll take the 15% + gains in performance for 7-10% total system cost any day.

Profanity isn't allowed in the technical forums.
-- stahlhart

 

[Teizo]

Jumped the clocks to 1200/1700 with 1.188v and a power limit of 20% on both cards
Max draw 827w at the wall = 702w used by the PSU.

That is amazing. That is 200 watts more than my 760s in SLI.

The highest I've ever seen was in Crysis 3 @ 1280/7000 and that was about 506 watts measured on the Killawatt.

I do personally think that people need to stop harping on price/performance so much and start paying more attention to total experience. If a card is cheap and performs well that is great but it matters very little if it puts out a ton of heat and sounds like a jet engine imho.

 

[Teizo]

I don't litecoin or bitcoin mine, I don't care to waste my bandwith, my electricity or my time on that [redacted]. I have a real job, that makes me real money. If you're really serious about making money with "coin farming" buy a server and pro cards and go to town, none of this amateur maybe it will work crap. If you were able to easily, no problem, 100% guaranteed make money back then everyone would do it. But you can't, it isn't guaranteed and most people don't even make money doing it.

People never learn. The Great Depression, the Dot.com boom and bust, the Housing Bubble.

I have a feeling this BitCoin/Litecoin stuff is going to suffer the same fate.

 

[Face2Face]

That is amazing. That is 200 watts more than my 760s in SLI.

The highest I've ever seen was in Crysis 3 @ 1280/7000 and that was about 506 watts measured on the Killawatt.

I do personally think that people need to stop harping on price/performance so much and start paying more attention to total experience. If a card is cheap and performs well that is great but it matters very little if it puts out a ton of heat and sounds like a jet engine imho.

My 7950's being 7970 boards and having high asic GPU's run hotter and burn more watts then most 7950's. Most 7950's are using 7950 reference boards (6+6) and have mid to low Asic ratings. So others with avg 7950's will more than likely have much less lower power usage. If I am correct both cards were hitting 70's-80's in temps @ 1200 core and more voltage + high temps = higher power consumption. Water cooling I would think would help quite a bit with power consumption.

I even asked this youtuber to run the same test with his similar setup and he was much lower consumption vs. my cards....

ah.... I think this thread is about GTX 780's in SLI

 

[SolMiester]

Not even close. I think you meant the best performance from 2 single GPU cards. Otherwise, R9 290 in CF or Tri-Fire, Gigabyte Windforce GTX780 Ghz Edition SLI (or nearly Tri-SLI) all offer superior price/performance than 780Ti SLI. At higher resolutions/4K, GTX780TI SLI can't provide superior gaming experience vs. 290X CF without overclocking.

Without overclocking, the 780Ti is one of the most overpriced cards out right now, along with R9 290X. You can also buy almost 3x EVGA Classified 780s for the price of 2 780Tis and the former setup would beat the latter without much problems.

GameGPU has a review of GTX780 SLI OC vs. GTX780 Ti SLI OC

It's very obvious from that review that 780Ti SLI is not worth $400 more over 780s. 3x EVGA 780 Classified OC vs. 2x GTX780Ti OC would be a slaughter.

I can't see 20nm GPUs being more than 1 year away. I would get 2 good after-market 780s, save $450+ and upgrade to 2x 20nm cards next year.

Until the 290/x get aftermarket cooling, I dont see how could even bring them into the equation for CF unless you are deaf?...is $/perf the only thing you know, after all the OP stated USER experience.

 

[hawtdawg]

I have 2 reference 780's (an evga and an MSI). Both do 1202mhz. I can play BF4 maxed @1440p with 150% pixel scaling, and Crysis 3 maxed @1440p with 2x MSAA and stay at 60+. Neither ever exceed 85c

 

[Piklar]

After gaming for a few days on a reference cooled crossfire 290x rig and also as an owner of a SLI GTX780 rig I've noticed some very distinct differences which is why I recommended GTx 780s over 290s at this point in time.

- Firstly the CF 290x rig put out bucketloads of heat! to the point I was sweating even with the windows open, this has not happened with the SLI 780 rig even with the door closed.

-Secondly the CF 290x rig throttles which noticeably impacted performance making what was originally smooth gameplay feel laggy/stuttery. The SLI 780s do not have this issue.

-Thirdly the noise! To remedy the throttling issue I had to crank the top cards fan up to 75% and the bottom card to 55% , the noise was loud enough to disturb my wife while reading in the lounge down the hall , she stomped down to my man sanctuary and said with a scowl " Isn't he supposed to be picking that thing up today?" then shut the door. This has never happened before , even when benching Heaven and Valley with reference cooled GTX 780s with fans at 100%.

Conclusion? CF 290 only makes sense if you are prepared to watercool or go aftermarket..

Verdict: If you have experience with both CF 290s and SLI 780s you would have to be deaf/blind, insensitive to heat (divorced, want to punish the wife), or massively biased fanboy to say that reference cooled CF 290s are preferable to SLI 780s.

P.S by the time we are done discussing these issues there will prolly be aftermarket 290 series available and hopefully void most of these problems..

 

[Face2Face]

the noise was loud enough to disturb my wife while reading in the lounge down the hall , she said came down to my man sanctuary and said with a scowl " Isn't he supposed to be picking that thing up today?" then shut the door.

LOL :biggrin:

Sorry, this is just too funny :thumbsup:

 

[Piklar]

LOL :biggrin:

Sorry, this is just too funny :thumbsup:

Actually she stomped down the hall so I could feel the vibration of displeasure through the floor as I had my noise cancelling heaphones on. Re- edited for descriptive accuracy..

 

[blackened23]

Like someone else said, 290X CF will become viable when water cooled or maybe with aftermarket coolers. (It should be noted that water doesn't eliminate heat, it merely removes it from the GPU more effectively - ambient temps will be *higher* compared to air cooling. In other words, your room will be even warmer.) But the experience between 290 CF and 780 SLI is not the same, not even close. I mean, i'd love for some of the guys who have used AMD exclusively to listen to the GTX 780 SLI acoustics with their ref shroud back to back with the AMD 290 reference shroud at 55%. (I know what the AMD reference shroud sounds like @ 55%...) And then tell me "it's not that bad". It just puzzles me when I see someone say "it isn't that bad". It's far worse than the competing product, that's for sure.... The performance between the two setups may be close, but you have to factor in the intangible user experience issues. Some people won't care of course and that's cool, but by the same token...it does matter to a lot of folks.

 

[Teizo]

Actually she stomped down the hall so I could feel the vibration of displeasure through the floor as I had my noise cancelling heaphones on. Re- edited for descriptive accuracy..

And you thought those 290s were hot!

Mad wife = D:

 

[FalseChristian]

I'm an nVidia nut and I'm sick of people dragging down the R9 290/290X! I'd kill for 2 of those cards! Also, they don't have the benefit of good aftermarket cooling yet and when they do they'll be as quit and run as cool as all your overpriced/underperforming GTX 780/780-Tis!

 

[Piklar]

I'm an nVidia nut and I'm sick of people dragging down the R9 290/290X! I'd kill for 2 of those cards! Also, they don't have the benefit of good aftermarket cooling yet and when they do they'll be as quit and run as cool as all your overpriced/underperforming GTX 780/780-Tis!

Its not about dragging down anything. Its about sharing experience. Sadly many who have not experienced both SLI 780s and CF 290s still offer their 2 cents worth as if they know it as fact. The 290x is a wicked card, however when you CF two of them in their current form there are legitimate issues as described throughout this thread, especially coming from SLI 780s. Before the cards began to throttle I was impressed at their crossfire performance and thought they are just as smooth as SLI 780s.. Looking forward to aftermarket more effective cooling solutions for the 290 series but currently SLI 780s offer better User Experience.