Is it worth installing my old GPU in the same build with a GTX 1070?

[PeterSa]

Good evening everyone, I was wondering if it was worth installing an old GTX 960 Strix (2gb) with my current GTX 1070. My build is running on an i5-6600K and a GTX 1070 -- would there be any noticeable difference? thank you ^^

 

[androbourne]

No. SLI is troublesome and it may downgrade the 1070 speeds to match speeds of the 960 to assist in proper SLI rendering.

I'd stick to one good card.

 

[DRagor]

Nope, no difference at all. The only sensible way to use those two cards together would be if you had more monitors then 1070 can drive - otherwise its just waste of electricity.

 

[why_wolf]

No. Install such a weaker card in SLI which actually make your performance worse not better.

 

[InvalidError]

If you mean for SLI, you can't SLI GPUs based on different architecture and even if you could, pairing two GPUs with vastly dissimilar performance yields worse performance than the faster of the two cards alone.

You could use the 960 as a dedicated PhysX card if you play many games that use it.

 

[PeterSa]

If you mean for SLI, you can't SLI GPUs based on different architecture and even if you could, pairing two GPUs with vastly dissimilar performance yields worse performance than the faster of the two cards alone.

You could use the 960 as a dedicated PhysX card if you play many games that use it.

thank you for the reply. So having the 960 dedicated for PhysX can improve performance? how would that work? thanks

 

[TJ Hooker]

There are only a handful of video games that support hardware accelerated PhysX. This means that physics calculations are performed on your GPU rather than CPU. By having a dedicated PhysX card, all physics calculations are performed on it, leaving your primary card to just handle graphics.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_games_with_hardware-accelerated_PhysX_support
Unless you plan on spending a lot of time playing games on that list, I wouldn't bother. Even then, I really don't know how much performance difference it would make. The following article seems to show it makes little difference, or even hurts performance in some cases:
http://www.technologyx.com/featured/using-a-graphics-card-as-a-physx-processor-beneficial-or-not/

 

[13thmonkey]

I cannot believe how many people in this thread thought you can SLI different generations of card. You cannot. DX12 does allow for mixed card functionality BUT it is game specific.