This type of thread is common on here, but I get the feeling you all enjoy building imaginary PCs hehe.
This one, though, will actually be built :)
So the customer here is a friend I carpool to college with, he has a $1200 budget and desires to first use it for his engineering graphics class, then move onto gaming during the summer.
The $1200 includes the PC itself, the display, and an operating system (probably Windows 7 64).
He has a few ideas regarding what he wants to do, but since he's not currently gaming he's a bit out of the loop. What he wants to do is get two older GPUs for the price of a current mid-tier and run them dual to get better performance.
Is this a good idea?
I told him he might want to consider just getting a single, medium level new card and then later make it a dual setup.
Cheers!
Progo
(also, bonus points to anyone who can find a nice display on the cheap lol)
-
Edited by MR E0S: 2/2/2014 4:35:18 PMFirst off, DO NOT ABSOLUTELY DO NOT! Go the dual GPU route. It's a gimmick. You're better off getting a single higher gen card.. Back in the day i tried that... 2x$100 video cards of the previous generation vs 1x$200 video card of current generation. The difference was so freaking massive. I did a benchmark between the 2 setups. The dual GPU's (of last gen) did an avg of 20 fps on the software I was using. The single that was current gen, was 50 fps on average on that same benchmarking software. And mind you... it was only a single generation apart that I tested. Now, that was about .... 5 or 6 years ago that I had done this little experiement, but I gaurantee you that not much has changed in regards to this outcome. SLI and Crossfire are gimmicks meant to make you needlessly spend extra money just to give your video card at most... a 10-20% increase in performance. So think about it for a second will ya. Let's say you purchase GPU's in the $300 range.. Do you really want to spend another $300 on a video card that is only worth 10-20% of what it actually is?