GTX 980 TI SLI Bottle neck on 2600k?

[basherJAD]

This is the first question ive asked on toms hardware, First my current rig.

Cpu is liquid cooled cant remember which specific cooler I have off the top of my head
i7 2600k
Gigabyte GA-Z68-D3H-B3
single EVGA GTX 980 TI
16GB 1866 DDR3
2TB 7200 Rpm HDD
1200WAtt PSU ( I know overkill)

So I have been playing games such as the Witcher 3 in 4k recently and getting between 30-40 FPS with everything on ultra except, Hair works is off and ambient occlusion down. My goal is to maintain 45+fps and hopefully get close to 60FPS in 4k( call me a dreamer). My question is how much improvement in frame rate would I get by putting two 980 TI's in SLI with my current motherboard and CPU, and if/how much they would bottleneck the two 980 Ti's. I do plan on eventually upgrading in the future, also I haven't experimented too much with overclocking my CPU but I could run it at 4.5ghz if I look up the right voltages.

 

[clutchc]

No, the i7 will not bottleneck dual 980 Ti cards. SLI performance increase over a single card will vary with the game and other variables. But max performance increase would be ~80%.

 

[Reaper_7799]

You should be able to get between 50-60 ultra depending on game and aa on the tough games like wticher3, gtav, far cry4, crysis 3. SLI is the way to go for 4K for now...I run mine at 4K all the time, even at 40 fps and it's smooth but I'll end up sli too.

 

[basherJAD]

So it turns out I have a Gen 3 Z68 mobo with SLI PCIe 3.0 X8X8. I know sandy bridge wont do PCIE 3.0 speeds. if I were to get an Ivy Bridge CPU, Think I would get better results getting an I7-3770K?

 

[Bossyfins]

Jump from Pcie 2.0 to 3.0 = marginal.

 

[basherJAD]

Yaa I figured it might be, I keep reading about how cards don't even take full advantage of pcie 2.0 x8x8 but not sure exactly what specs a card has to meet where pcie 2.0 would bottleneck the card. That is an article that needs to be written if it hasn't been, What would be needed to bottleneck pcie 2.0/3.0 x16/x8 and how to tell. just kinda sad how im on a 2011 CPU and its unnecessary to upgrade after almost 5 years

 

[Bossyfins]

Well, Intel really has no competition. THey marginalized margins, and now they lost a lot of the PC market.

 

[mlga91]

At 4k you'll see an excellent scaling doing SLI, you'll get 50-60 fps most of the time, as for the pcie 2.0 vs pcie 3.0, the difference is minimal, less than 1 fps most of the cases, so, there is no bottleneck there either.

http://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/pci_express_scaling_game_performance_analysis_review,1.html