Question 5 year old SLI or Budget Card

[Landstander]

Because of a hardware failure I'm rebuilding my PC before I really planned to and doing it on a budget.

I currently have a Gigabyte NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660 2GB GDDR5 (factory o/c'd). It's been fine for me since I'm still catching up with games from a few years back.

That said, I realize I could pick up a second one of these on eBay for probably $50 and do an SLI set up.

Is SLI really worth it? I get the idea I can expect about a 80% bump in performance.

Are there any budget video cards (sub $100) that might work better than two 5 year old cards?

 

[TJ Hooker]

Not all games support SLI. You may get 80% more performance best case scenario, in some games you may get no improvement. Also, depending on resolution/settings, having only 2GB of VRAM could be an issue.

Better off getting something like an RX 570. As low as $120 new, $100 or less used.

 

[Landstander]

From the research I've done, an RX 560/GTX 1050 ($100-130) is probably comparable to an overclocked GTX 660, definitely surpassed by the 660 in SLI.

Stepping up, the RX 570 ($125-ish) does appear to be at least twice the card the GTX 660 is and SLI would only partially close that gap.
Within the same price/performance range seems to be the GTX 1650 ($150) which is two years newer so less likely to be found used.

It really seems like sub-$100 is about the value of the old GTX 660 with nothing at the price point surpassing it except, like you said, a used RX 570.

Are there any improved graphical features that the newer cards bring to the table besides performance?

 

[TJ Hooker]

RX 570 has DirectX 12 support, whereas the GTX 660 likely has no (or limited) DX12 support. This can allow for new graphics effects/features, although it would depend on what was implemented in the game.

I also believe that older Geforce cards lack support for Freesync monitors (which was added for the newer cards), so you'd also gain that going to the RX 570.

 

[hftvhftv]

Get a new card, I have two GTX 770 4GB cards in SLI and it's more of a pain than anything else to get certain games running, for example, if I adjust the volume in a game while SLI is enabled in full screen mode, my whole computer will freeze up and I have to do a hard reboot.

 

[hftvhftv]

Nvidia is going to be dropping driver support for Kepler most likely in a year or two as well.

 

[cryoburner]

Within the same price/performance range seems to be the GTX 1650 ($150) which is two years newer so less likely to be found used.

Considering RX 570s can be found for less while offering more performance than a GTX 1650, there isn't much point in going with a 1650 unless your power supply isn't capable of handling anything more powerful.

 

[hftvhftv]

Not all games support SLI. You may get 80% more performance best case scenario, in some games you may get no improvement. Also, depending on resolution/settings, having only 2GB of VRAM could be an issue.

Better off getting something like an RX 570. As low as $120 new, $100 or less used.

This is your best advice, I have a friend with an i5 3550s and an RX 570 8GB card, and it outperforms my SLI GTX 770s.