4 way sli crossfirex3/13/2023 If however you do not have large multiple screens to run and a heavily overclocked CPU to feed them then I fear many will be sniggering behind you back because what four graphics cards can do, the smart money would be spent on a Crossfire/SLI setup which uses just two GPU's and as we have shown today often performs better. If you happen to have around £2k laying around to buy these mammoth GPU setups with change leftover for PSU to run them, you will certainly have the bragging rights to put anyone in their place. It has to be said though that the NVIDIA cooler was quieter than AMD albeit slightly and with four cards sandwiched together, whichever setup you choose, noise will be an issue you will have to endure I'm afraid. To counter this I set both setups fans to their maximum and both setups were extremely loud at full tilt. This could be because of throttling issues due to excessive temps ensuring NVIDIA's cards temperatures and therefore fan speed was kept artificially low. The story doesn't end there though as the NVIDIA setup ran significantly quieter than the AMD setup. Four AMD cards are cheaper to buy, costing around £1500 compared to NVIDIA's £1776 and at the settings used today appear to work better when paired together. That is going to make an almighty dent in anyone's electricity consumption but if you can afford to buy four of these flagship graphics cards, it is unlikely you are going to worry about the electricity bill. You will need nothing less than a 1200W PSU for a quad setup with a 1500W recommended as a minimum should you decide to push the cards as far as they will go. In quad configuration both setups consume a serious amount of energy. So while the AMD cards scale better and the NVIDIA card is the current single GPU performance king, it is NVIDIA who have the quiter and less power hungry card. To make matters worse performance was often lesse with four cards than three! I'm sure future driver revisions would improve performance but I cannot stress more clearly that unless you intend of running Eyefinity or NVIDIA Surround with multiple, large screens then you would simply be wasting your money with a quad setup from either camp. The diminishing returns only worsen when a fourth card is added. The performance gains offered at this resolution, even with Ultra settings applied are so small that you would be very hard pressed to physically notice the difference other than for benchmarking purposes. What is obvious though is even a 30" 2560x1600 screen does not warrant a triple graphics card setup, be it the HD7970 or GTX680. Some games favour AMD while in others, NVIDIA have the clear advantage. Any more than a dual card configuration and it becomes less clear as it would depend entirely on your setup and choice of game or benchmark. While it could be argued that I was using an older driver (PCIe 3.0 enabled) for the NVIDIA setup, a quick and dirty run using the latest drivers showed comparative results. The NVIDIA configurations simply could not compete with AMD in the scaling of single vs multiple card setup. However, dual card setups and higher have to go with the better scaling AMD CrossfireX setup. For that it deserves considerable praise. It wins in all areas: quieter, cooler, faster while consuming less power. If I were forced to choose between the two as a single graphics card, the KFA2 GTX680 wins out. Whichever your preference of graphics card manufacturer, whether you sit with the green team or the red, both factions will serve you extremely well.
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