keep 2 9800gx2 ssc or get gtx 280

[ibp_john]

Tri-SLI bridge: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814998401

It should have come with your motherboard, but I don't know about the 680i's

 

[Lurch3]

I was just asking about the RAID because I didn't know the purpose of it or if it was a "required" setup. I want to have two separate drives and didn't know how RAID effected that, easier answer than I thought, hopefully.

just a point of interest for me to get 3 cards, wether it's worth it is another question.

 

[Hovaucf]

the cost vs. extra performance is definitely not worth it, but if you want a few extra FPS go ahead, but in some cases it doesnt improve performance.

 

[Lurch3]

read above for my current and soon to be setups....in your opinion is 3 9800GX2s worth it over 2x of them?

 

[scooterlibby]

I don't believe you can tri-sli the 9800GX2. I've never heard of 6 gpu driver support from Nvidia.

 

[Lurch3]

yeah, Scooter, about the time I noticed your post, I noticed on another website that the computer treats two 9800gx2s as 4GPU's due to the fact that each one as two GPUS. So I will technically be at 4GPU's even though I am really not...oh well. Thanks though.

 

[geofelt]

@lurch3:
Raid-1 takes two drives and mirrors them. What is on one drive is copied to the other drive. If one drive fails, the other will still have your data intact. It is used by servers that can't tolerate even moments of unavailability. You and I should just back up our critical data to an external device, and take the time to recover if there is a drive failure. By the way, hard drive mean time to failure is advertised at about 100 years.

Raid-0 is striping. Half of your data is written on each drive. This is very good for sequential processing since the data can be read/written to both drives in parallel. Synthetic benchmarks show this benefit, but single user benchmarks do not show any real benefit.

There are other raid combinations involving more than two drives. Raid is set up in the bios. You have to specificly set it up to get it.
I tried it some time ago, and found no real benefit.

 

[snipingkid]

I have a question. I just got a 9800GX2 about 2 weeks ago. I have the opportunity to exchange it for an EVGA GTX 280. Should I go for it?

I have an EVGA 790i, so I can always SLI, but spending 1000$ worth of cards seems ridiculous. I had no intention to SLI, but is the GTX 280 that good? Should I SLI GX2s instead? Thanks

 

[dagger]

I have a question. I just got a 9800GX2 about 2 weeks ago. I have the opportunity to exchange it for an EVGA GTX 280. Should I go for it?

I have an EVGA 790i, so I can always SLI, but spending 1000$ worth of cards seems ridiculous. I had no intention to SLI, but is the GTX 280 that good? Should I SLI GX2s instead? Thanks

You're better off sli 2 9800gx2s instead. They say quad scales horribly, but with the amount of optimizations 9800gx2 has received over time, it actually works fairly well. More often than not, it outperforms the far more expensive gtx280 sli, in rare cases, tri sli.

Benchmarks that were linked earlier:

Considering an EVGA 9800gx2 cost $280, it's better value over EVGA gtx280.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814130338
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814130365

 

[monsta]

^+1
Quad SLI optimisations just keep getting better , and more affordable now than before, would def recommend it