Question 1 GPU, or 2 ? Which will be best?

niavlys

Reputable
Apr 3, 2016
10
0
4,520
I have a MSI 970X v2 gaming MB. MSI says there are 2 PCIE 2 X16 slots on it, but then in the details it is expanded between 1 PCI_E2 1 x 16 and 1 PCI_E4 x8).
Just to give more details, I have 20 GB of ram, and my proc is a FX-8350 8 core proc running at 4.5GHZ.

As graphic cards, I have an old GTX 1050 TI, and i just bought a GTX 1660 TI superclock, both of which are PCIE 3 x16, not installed yet.

I also have 2 monitors, one main and a secondary (to be used independantly to avoid alt-tabing).

So my goal was to use the old GPU with the old monitor for desktop applications, discord and so on while i play on the main monitor, connected to my main and new 1660.

The downside of this configuration is that both GPUs would run on 8X each, having to share the x16 bus instead of having my higher end card run at 16bits. The + side is that each monitor is driven by its own GPU and memory bank, thus having a much better graphical computation.

The other option is to simply pull out the old GPU and only run the 1660 for both monitors. Just to give you an idea, for now, the 1050 TI is doing the job very well; it only reaches its limit on a very badly programmed game (the isle). Other than that game, everything else runs just fine at max settings.

So the question is, I am better to run the new GPU by itself, benefiting from the whole 16 bits bus, or would i benefit more from having the workload divided into two GPU, but at a lower transfer rate?

Also, I am considering buying a better MB, one with PCI 3 express slots.

Thanks in advance.
 

Lutfij

Titan
Moderator
Please include/list your specs like so:
CPU:
Motherboard:
Ram:
SSD/HDD:
GPU:
PSU:
OS:

For your GPU, you should use the single most powerful GPU that won't cripple your PSU(due to it's power output limits). How are you on 20GB of ram?!?!