Upgrade to a new GPU or go SLI? Galaxy GeForce GTX 670 (67NPH6DV5ZVX )

[madperk]

My question is do I buy a second GPU or move up to a new video card all together? Do I need to consider a new Power Supply?

I have never run a SLI system I usually just rebuild every three or four years with a possible video upgrade in the middle of the life of the system.

I Built a PC based on recommendations from Q4 2012 and early Q1 2013, see specs below. The rig runs great but I am considering moving to a quad monitor system from a dual monitor system. The primary reason is that I would like to have a pano 3 monitor setup for the game Elite Dangerous. Every game, including ED, has run beautifully on this system. I can usually just take the default graphics settings which auto detect to high or ultra for most games and then tweak them a bit. On the spare monitor I usually have a full screen Sling Player window up with a ball game running or using the hdmi input and my chrome cast.

• 
  MSI Computer Corporation LGA 1155 Intel Z77 SATA 6 Gb/s USB 3.0 3 PCI-E x16 3.0 ATX Motherboard Z77A-GD80
  Corsair Enthusiast Series TX 750 Watt ATX/EPS 80 PLUS Bronze (TX750)
  Corsair Vengeance 8 GB (2 x 4 GB) DDR3 1600 MHz PC3 12800 240-Pin DDR3 Dual Channel Memory Kit (CMZ8GX3M2A1600C9)
  OCZ Technology 256GB Vector Series SATA 6.0 GB/s 7 mm Height 2.5-Inch SSD with 100K IOPS And 5-Year Warranty- VTR1-25SAT3-256G
  Galaxy GeForce GTX 670 GC 2 GB GDDR5 PCI Express 3.0 DVI/DVI/HDMI/DP SLI Ready Graphics Card, 67NPH6DV5ZVX Graphics Cards 67NPH6DV5ZVX
  Intel Core i7-3770K Quad-Core Processor 3.5 GHz 8 MB Cache LGA 1155 - BX80637I73770K
  Fractal Design Core 3000 Cases, Black (FD-CA-CORE-3000-BL)
  2 LG IPS LED 27EA63 Monitors

 

[paotasos]

Get an nvidia 970 or 980 and with the 750 watt power supply you can even run two 970 in sli in the future if you need more performance.

 

[ManoaNosea]

Corsair make good power supplies so you have plenty of life left in it, it should be able to handle two video cards at load - as long as the video cards don't exceed 300W each (they usually don't unless the video card is special).

from a performance point of view, two GTX 670 will be about as fast as a single GTX 780, maybe a little faster.
but SLI has other considerations:

- your computer will be using twice more power than a single card configuration both at idle and at load !
- you will have to deal with the many SLI problems, such as:
- diminished scaling (game runs slower than 200%)
- no SLI support in the game and therefor no scaling (running only at 100%)
- increased CPU dependence (the more videocards are in an SLI configuration the more CPU cores are required)
- little or no changes in the minimum("bottom") framerate (due to increased CPU overhead for running an SLI system)
- stuttering

I am in the same boat, but I have a GTX 580 a much older card and I could have buyed an another GTX 580 for about 300$ with a built-in watercooling block, but then I realized I would need a new power supply which would cost me an another 350$, and then I also realized my system will be burning twice as much power and I would have to solve the many SLI problems, so I have chosen to buy a new video card (GTX 780 TI with some added performance) for about 900$ with integrated water cooling block and according to comparisons I have seen that single card is about 2.5x faster than a single 580 - so in the end I get more performance than I could ever get with a dual SLI 580, no SLI problems and a much cheaper power bills both at idle and load.

I should point out that the 900 series NVIDIA cards don't support windows xp, the 700 series do

 

[RobCrezz]

I would go for the 970.