What would you guys go with as your video card setup if you had...?

I need to read up more on SLI video cards, but im currently running 2 nvdia 460 GTXs in SLI but idk how to activate sli, or if windows does it automatically now. I was honestly hoping for a lot more power from my computer but im gonna have to figure out what is holding my computer back the most.



Anyways someone told me that i could somehow increase my frame rate in 3D games if i disable my SLI config. I noticed in almost any game i ran in 3D that the fps would drop by 50% when in 3D.



I was always told that 2 cheaper SLI video cards would run better than a more expensive video card on its own. Ive always had nvidia cards and hear they are the best route.



Anyways my question basically is asking what you would do, SLI or one really nice video card?

Also do you guys think 2 460 GTXs should run any video game perfectly fine in 3D?



Im running 16 gigs of DDR3 on an intel core i7 and am almost always running multiple instances of games, otherwise ive got 20-60 tabs of firefox open while streaming music while playing a game.

Thanks for your time.|||Check your Motherboard specs, if the specs for the motherboard say like PCIE 2.0 x16 (x4) or something that probably means that it isn't running the other graphics card or not at a very efficient rate. The problem could be there. The 460 wasn't a GREAT graphics card either but if you have two then you could be running at x8/x8 which COULD make things not QUITE as fast as you want it. Also what i7? the range of i7 products are quite a bit.



And if you are running that much stuff then I would assume the problem would be in your processor being overloaded.



Find that widget that allows you to see what CPU % you are using up. If it is 100 constantly. then that is your problem more so than the SLI cards.



Also 16 gigs of ram???? Lol prob your processor bottlenecking it|||Just a tip for ya zero, running multiple games is not called stupidity, its called multi tasking and can get you very far when it comes to MMOs or any game you can farm stuff afk in. For example i used to run 2+ instances of star wars galaxies at a time to be able to kill anything without worry.

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|||Oh also shouldve mentioned i got 12 gigs of ddr3 not 16, i was gonna go with 6 gigs and then wanted 8 or 10 and wound up saving by just buying 2 orders of the ram which amounted to 12 total gigs.

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|||Not sure if serious.....



SLI is activated through drivers. Go toy the nvidia control panel and tick the relevant box to run them in SLI.



2x460s are as powerful as a GTX570, so yes, two cheap video cards are really better than one more expensive.



Frame rates are expected to drop by 50% in 3D mode, because every frame is rendered twice. If you are running with upto date drivers, SLI should't be an issue.



2 460's can not automatically run any game in 3D perfectly. You will need a more expensive setup for that, perhaps 2x 560Ti's.



Running multiple games at once is called stupidity.