Gfx cards in sli for triple screens - advice needed

[Billy Pilgrim]

I have a four-year old pc with two gtx 780s in sli. It seems that one of the cards is giving up the ghost.
So i'm looking at replacing them both with, maybe, two gtx 1070s. Or one 1080ti, or...
It's all gonna cost a lot of money though.
I play AC pretty much exclusively and into the future the pc will almost only be used for racing sims - AC for a long time yet, i reckon.
The triples demand a lot of grunt, obviously.
What advice do you have for me?
I know sli is maybe getting less support now, but it is well supported in AC.

 

[Peter Klawitter]

also depends on your CPU, RAM and MOTHERBOARD. (what do you have?)

 

[Billy Pilgrim]

Mobo: Z87 pro by Asus, cpu: i7 4770 k, and 16gb ram

 

[Peter Klawitter]

IMHO, if you power 1080p triples at 100Hz, then you could come by with your system and 1070 GPU, lower graphics, not fully/ ultra set.
but if you want to have 1440p with 144/165Hz, you will need 32GB RAM and 1080Ti GPU's for AC to run in highest/ ultra, and usually CPU is the bottleneck, since the new generation GPU's outrun CPU's. (CPU and motherboard, good place is now 7700K + Z270, CPU is @4.xGhz and easily overclocked without hick-ups and problems to 5.0Ghz -> air cooled and stable) so there are few parameters things to keep in mind when you want a PC to fully support and run your AC sim smoothly.
*** would not go with i7-8700K + Z370, as I am convinced there is a new chipset/ board coming and will replace the interim Z370 ***

 

[Billy Pilgrim]

IMHO, if you power 1080p triples at 100Hz, then you could come by with your system and 1070 GPU, lower graphics, not fully/ ultra set.
but if you want to have 1440p with 144/165Hz, you will need 32GB RAM and 1080Ti GPU's for AC to run in highest/ ultra, and usually CPU is the bottleneck, since the new generation GPU's outrun CPU's. (CPU and motherboard, good place is now 7700K + Z270, CPU is @4.xGhz and easily overclocked without hick-ups and problems to 5.0Ghz -> air cooled and stable) so there are few parameters things to keep in mind when you want a PC to fully support and run your AC sim smoothly.
*** would not go with i7-8700K + Z370, as I am convinced there is a new chipset/ board coming and will replace the interim Z370 ***

Thanks a lot for your reply and opinion
I'm now thinking about going for one 1080ti to replace the two 780s and keeping the mobo and CPU I already have, and maybe/maybe not adding some RAM. Your opinion on this setup is welcome.

 

[Jan Larsen]

There's far less issues with single vs. double or triple cards. If you can afford it, go big on one card.

 

[Peter Klawitter]

Thanks a lot for your reply and opinion
I'm now thinking about going for one 1080ti to replace the two 780s and keeping the mobo and CPU I already have, and maybe/maybe not adding some RAM. Your opinion on this setup is welcome.

one 1080Ti is also good to go, set a budget and stay within. that’s what i would do. (for AC i know from a training sim and from simcenter that AC benefits greatly from SLI setups, over single GPU, i had 2x SLI Titan X (Maxwell) [even tried 3x SLI but not that big of a difference for my simracing, AC was great already with 2x SLI] was getting uncapped close to 250 or sometimes close to 300fps in AC, would cap it at 142fps since i have 144Hz triples @7680x1440 graphics almost everything maxed out) then i went suggested by many since i am mainly on iRacing to single GPU -> Nvidia Titan Xp (Pascal) and now can’t eve get close to 144fps, goes up and down between 80-140fps. just my 2cents in all this. my base system has stayed the same except GPU changed few times. (Asus RVE X99, i7-6850K, 64GB, M.2 SSD, Nvidia Titan Xp (Pascal) -> all fan air cooled and no overclocking)
*** before this, I tried 2x AMD based systems and quickly decided NO GO on AMD, most horrendous investment and hardware (stutters, bluescreens, massive drivers issues, game incompatibilities, just too many negatives), compared to the Intel / Nvidia hardware ***

just footnote, if i could go back to my twin or triple SLI Titan X (Maxwell) i would immediately, but unfortunately sold all three GPU’s a while ago...all depends on the “games” (sim titles) you planning to drive/ play. (some don’t support fully SLI, some don’t take advantage of multi cores or multi threading, some take advantage of one but not the other and so on, just tons of variations which makes it difficult to “nail” the right system)

 

[Team_Scream]

I am running triple 1440 monitors right now on an i5-8600K OC'd to 5.1 ghz on air, with a GTX-1070 Ti Amp Extreme (also overclocked on air) and there is not a single thing I would change about my system right now.

In my opinion, the only "REAL" reason you might want a 1080ti is if you plan on going VR, which I have no plans to do any time soon. I race way too much to have goggles on for the several hours a day sometimes that I spend at my rig. In my opinion, triples are still the way to go for racing, particularly when you start using button boxes to make changes, do multiple pit stops in a race and some of the other things in endurance races.

Get a 1070ti, save some money.

About 4 months ago I was running a GTX-1060 with triples and felt like I could have lived just fine with that system. It was running a locked i5-7500 and a Mini-ITX Asus Z270 mobo with 16 gigs of ram and I returned everything and bought a full size Asus Maximus X Hero wifi mobo and put it all in a bigger case so I could overclock the 8600K effectively. So far, the system is rock solid stable at 5.1ghz and the 1070ti AMP Extreme is more than capable.

 

[Peter Klawitter]

I am running triple 1440 monitors right now on an i5-8600K OC'd to 5.1 ghz on air, with a GTX-1070 Ti Amp Extreme (also overclocked on air) and there is not a single thing I would change about my system right now.

In my opinion, the only "REAL" reason you might want a 1080ti is if you plan on going VR, which I have no plans to do any time soon. I race way too much to have goggles on for the several hours a day sometimes that I spend at my rig. In my opinion, triples are still the way to go for racing, particularly when you start using button boxes to make changes, do multiple pit stops in a race and some of the other things in endurance races.

Get a 1070ti, save some money.

About 4 months ago I was running a GTX-1060 with triples and felt like I could have lived just fine with that system. It was running a locked i5-7500 and a Mini-ITX Asus Z270 mobo with 16 gigs of ram and I returned everything and bought a full size Asus Maximus X Hero wifi mobo and put it all in a bigger case so I could overclock the 8600K effectively. So far, the system is rock solid stable at 5.1ghz and the 1070ti AMP Extreme is more than capable.

great feedback, thank you so much. would you be able to post the BIOS settings for OC and the GPU OC screenshots with (GPU-Z, and etc.) whatever you can use. would love to share this with other friends who have the i5 also. thanks again for posting and sharing your experience! really nice to see that rock solid OC can work and push the sims.

 

[Beef36]

.

 

[Billy Pilgrim]

I am running triple 1440 monitors right now on an i5-8600K OC'd to 5.1 ghz on air, with a GTX-1070 Ti Amp Extreme (also overclocked on air) and there is not a single thing I would change about my system right now.

In my opinion, the only "REAL" reason you might want a 1080ti is if you plan on going VR, which I have no plans to do any time soon. I race way too much to have goggles on for the several hours a day sometimes that I spend at my rig. In my opinion, triples are still the way to go for racing, particularly when you start using button boxes to make changes, do multiple pit stops in a race and some of the other things in endurance races.

Get a 1070ti, save some money.

About 4 months ago I was running a GTX-1060 with triples and felt like I could have lived just fine with that system. It was running a locked i5-7500 and a Mini-ITX Asus Z270 mobo with 16 gigs of ram and I returned everything and bought a full size Asus Maximus X Hero wifi mobo and put it all in a bigger case so I could overclock the 8600K effectively. So far, the system is rock solid stable at 5.1ghz and the 1070ti AMP Extreme is more than capable.

That's interesting. Thanks.
I also want to know how many fps you're getting.

 

[Team_Scream]

getting screen shots of 6 pages of bios is not something im interested in doing, but I will tell you that i followed this guys tutorial to get to 5.1 ghz stable, I was actually able to use a multiplier of 51 instead of 50 (for the record):

For the Zotac 1070ti AMP Extreme video card OC, I followed this guys tutorial to get there:

I used the Zotac Firestorm utility to get there. Here is a cap of the settings I am currently running. The OC is not huge, but it is completely stable.

As far as frame rates, I get 125'ish or so in single player AC @ Spa in the Lotus F1 car and with a full grid in SRS, I hover above 90 but never below that it seems. I stopped looking at it because I don't really care about frame rates as long as I don't notice them as an issue which I never have so far.

Below are the settings I use in AC for reference.



I am an old guy who has been at the computer gaming thing for over 30 years now. My first computer was an Amiga, and then 2 years later I bought a Mac II when it was released. From that point forward, I owned every new Mac/Apple that came out for more than 15 years because I needed them for work. The first triple screen set up I owned was a Mac Centris 650 with 2 video cards running (3) 19" CRT monitors in 1993, and I was an avid player of F-18 Hornet a couple years later when it came out, which was one of the first flight sims that you could play against others online. We had a "squadron" that would challenge other "squadrons" online and it was a blast.

The only reason I tell you that ^ is because I think a lot of people these days place far too much "value" on frame rate. Over a certain point, it just doesn't make that much difference.... at least not to me. Every movie you have watched in the last 50 years has been shot at 24 frames a second for reference. Resolution is key, frame rate is secondary to me.

Anyway, the system I am running now is bad to the bone....for me. YMMV.|

Here is a quick slideshow of my first home built rig. this is the prototype. So far is it awesome. The next one will feature a few changes and variations and be slightly shorter. I originally planned for this one to be able to house the computer and SimuCUBE in front of the monitors, which it can, but I built a computer cage instead which sits off to the side. The whole thing is still a work in progress, but for now it is great fun.