Looking to squeeze a bit more performance out of my rig for a few years more until I’m forced to upgrade to a newer build.
Just swapped to a Z97 Gaming 5 up from a Gaming 3 giving me SLI support. Just bought another GTX 960, and while it’s in transit, looking for some player opinions on performance increases or maybe even the lack there of.
I play this game on a 6 year old laptop…would not recommend.
First you need to figure out what is your bottleneck. More often than not, the bottleneck is CPU and RAM.
I’ve never had great luck with SLI performance increases, even at the xx80Ti levels. Usually it’s better to get the next card up / next generation up. Would advise looking into the new 2060 right now rather than SLI 2x 960s.
Disclaimer: No idea what $$$ you are willing to spend
Not going to matter if your cpu can’t keep up.
I do not recommend SLI. Upgrading your single card is the better solution.
Yeah, you’re not gonna like to hear this, but SLI isn’t great for esports. Frame time can go bananas with multi-GPU.
Also, SLI scaling basically isn’t being worked on anymore for any game beyond DX11. If you get 30% in a game (other than OW I mean) that’s a lot. You’d get lot more performance from a cheaper, singular card.
Plus, Z97 platform , you likely have a bottleneck. Overwatch is surprisingly CPU dependant on top of that.
In my experience Overwatch scales quite well in SLI, it’s possibly more cost-effective than upgrading a single card. The problem for me was I burned two cards two separate times. When I tried next generation cards in an entirely new build I hit 80 C within a few minutes in training mode when a single one of those cards topped at 65 C for me in Overwatch. I returned the second card and stuck with one.
I think people are exaggerating (no clue what the bananas guy is referring to), but given my experience I can’t recommend SLI either unless you have a custom loop, which you won’t. For reference, I saw a big improvement getting a second gtx 970 with a locked i7 4770, so my processor was no beast. That might actually have been on a z97 “platform”, so Mozts is talking out of his a.s.s. Actually I think my motherboard was the same as yours, MSI Gaming 5.
One thing I would strongly caution you on is not assuming that prices make any sense. You might be able to get newer gen parts that are substantially better at similar prices, especially given you are a couple of generations back. You can take consolation in the newest generation being @#$%, from gpus to processors.
In other words, multi GPU has had a history of bad frame pacing, which translates to micro-stutter and doesn’t necessarily show up on FPS measurement.
You’ll see that I specified exactly what I was talking about, so your reading might be more off yours than my talking is off mine.
Overwatch does scale nice with SLI, which is why I said “other than OW”. Overwatch is also more CPU intensive than most games to the point even the 4770 will see some bottleneck in 1080p. If OP has a more popular i5 rather than the more expensive i7, he’ll feel it even more so thanks to the lack of HT (which is also another oddity of OW, but I digress).
In 1920x1080 going to 970 SLI on the same Z97 motherboard and an unexceptional locked processor that is bested by more recent i5 processors I experienced a big fps boost without noticing any stutters. You can experience a bottleneck with a Hero IX motherboard and an overclocked to 5ghz 7700k as I have (1080 gpu vs 2080 ti), that doesn’t mean you know what you’re talking about.
Have you tried disabling HPET?
Are you asking me?fadsfasdfasd
Sure why not, but literally everybody should turn this off.
I’m wondering whether you’re remarking on a cpu bottleneck with a 7700k. We’re also talking about 300 fps here, 240 fps+.
Actually meant to reply to the original poster, but a lot of people have benefited from it, because it’s a big and completely unnecessary CPU bottleneck.
htt ps://ww w.ana ndtech. co m/show/12678/a-timely-discovery-examining-amd-2nd-gen-ryzen-results/3
[The engineers recommend that] as far as benchmarking is concerned, it should not matter whether or not HPET is enabled or not. There may be some applications that may not function as advertised if HPET is disabled, so to be safe, keep it enabled, across all platforms. Whatever you decide, be consistent across platforms.
That’s from Intel. And what does this have to do with the poster’s SLI question?
If it’s still a feature in SLI (was one back when I ran 560 Ti SLI, but think I heard somewhere that it was removed), I’d probably suggest using the second card for AA. Bad frame-times and artifacts are common problems when running SLI, which probably would have a pretty unpleasant effect on OW.
I noticed no irregularity in Overwatch, just a much better fps.
Z97 is unlikely to bottleneck him much, I can still get 100+ FPS on a stock 2600k.
A bottleneck you’d have to test with better gpus- if there’s a bottleneck the better gpu, or the second gpu, won’t do much.