1070 SLI for 1080p 144hz?

[Gron113]

First off, I have a 6600k OC'd to 4.2 ghz without upping the voltage. I have 16gb of RAM, and a GTX 1070 Strix - one of the binned cards they sell for, like, 10 bucks cheaper. I have money burning a hole in my wallet and noticed that most games on my 144hz 1080p monitor (asus vg248qe) don't really reach that sweet 144fps in most games. Either I play older titles, or run newer or more demanding titles at lower settings.

I have an ASUS Z170-AR motherboard, which can handle SLI easily, and I have a bridge already, though not one of the fancy high bandwidth ones. Would getting a second 1070 be good enough to solve my woes of lowering settings for 144fps?

Few questions I want to ask here as well:

1. DirectX12 has a fancy new feature to run multiple GPUs differently than SLI or Crossfire, with (from what I hear from Ashes of the Singularity benchmarks so far) much better scaling than those two proprietary methods of chucking two GPUs in a PC. Would it be feasible to say that DirectX12 games late this year or early next year would start shipping with this feature? Rather than DirectX12 games now, which have horrible scaling with SLI.

2. I have seen a few benchmarks already, and although they look promising for the most part, some are running into a lot of CPU bottlenecks when it comes to 1080p. 1440p and 4K are fine, but I only have 1080p, and I need it for 144hz. Anything anyone's seen on other benchmarks that would make this a dealbreaker? A 6600k isn't bad, but... still - a lot of the test benches these people work with have CPUs double the power and they are still running into bottlenecks.

3. When my PC is left idle for 10 minutes it starts mining bitcoin. Yes, I got into the craze like everyone else, and I mainly use it just to buy more games. Two 1070s would be great for that sort of thing, right?

4. I understand that Volta based graphics cards are going to be released early next year, which isn't too long, and that getting a second Pascal card now would be bad decision making. I understand that, but instead I hope to get whatever the equivalent is of the 'ti' card that will release, which will hopefully take long enough for me to live out this purchase for a full year. Worth it?

And that's pretty much it.

TL;DR... I already have a 1070, is it worth the possible compatibility/scaling/bottleneck issues for 144hz at 1080p?

 

[ZRace]

For the gaming part, I'd recommend selling the 1070 and getting a 1080 (Ti). Although DX12 has fancy new built-in methods to do multi-GPU rendering more efficiently, developers have to implement that feature, and only about a quarter of the current DX12 games seem to support it. The others won't use the second 1070 at all. It would be a great choice with the support from the game developers, but those mostly don't seem very enthusiastic about it...
And the older DX11 titles don't all scale well with SLI. You should check the games you want to play beforehand at least.

For bitcoin mining, the dual 1070s would obviously do a lot better though, that would be a plus.

 

[Gron113]

I should say right here that I live in Australia, so tech prices have a huge hike where I am. I either have to ship it and get massive tax and shipping prices, or buy locally where it is somehow even more expensive.

Ideally, I would go with ZRace's solution of selling my current GPU and getting a 1080ti, however here even the cheapest 1080tis are well over a thousand dollars. Believe it or not, it would actually be way cheaper to go with two 1070s. Even a 1080 here is just over a thousand.

 

[ZRace]

If it really is a lot cheaper to get an additional 1070 rather than buy a 1080 (Ti) and sell your 1070, then I'd consider doing SLI. Just remember that not all games will support it, so look up your games before doing this.

Also, for mining, you'll have to disable SLI every time you want to use both GPUs for it, and turn it on again to use it for gaming, iirc 😛

 

[Gron113]

I actually saw that about mining just now - What is the problem with SLI when mining? Only problem is that I have mine set up to start 10 minutes after I've left my PC to idle. It would be worse to swap that automated process for having to turn SLI off and on constantly. Is SLI COMPLETELY incompatible with bitcoin mining or is it some kind of marginal performance hit?

If it's just a performance hit of, say, 10mh/s, I would actually rather just leave SLI on tbh. But that might not be the case. Other articles on google only bring up questions about HB bridges, or having two GPUs in two different systems.

What is the ACTUAL problem with SLI and mining? Other than that, I am pretty much completely sold on SLI at this point. Thanks for your help so far!

 

[ZRace]

It's definitely not a performance hit I'm talking about. It doesn't always happen, but sometimes, depending on the used software (and other factors like mainboard...), the mining softare won't recognize the second GPU installed as long as SLI is turned on. My guess would be that it's because in SLI, the second GPU gets linked to the first, and acts dependent on it, instead of independently.

So it could work without having to do anything if you're lucky, but you'd have to switch all the time if you're not :/

 

[Gron113]

OK all good, I'll see - probably not a total deal breaker depending on how it turns out. Thanks so much for your help!