"I see two types of buyers considering these cards.
First, there are the value-oriented enthusiasts who try to keep their systems updated once a year or so. They'd love the fastest technology, but know that flagships always carry the largest pricing premiums. These are the folks who kept an eye on our Best Graphics Cards for the Money column, and when Radeon HD 4870s hit $140 bucks, they bought (and got a killer deal, even by today's standards). If you belong to that group, are looking at "Radeon HD 5700-series" and expecting a big step up in performance, even the 5770 is a disappointment. After all, if you own a 4870 or 4890 already, that card is faster in today's games.
Of course, there's an X factor in play: ATI's value-adds. Eyefinity-the ability to run three concurrent display outputs-is completely unique at the high-end still. It's particularly exciting at the $159 and $129 price points being represented here. Likewise, the ability to bitstream Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD MA are capabilities previously available through $200+ sound cards. Now you can get that functionality from a DirectX 11 graphics card. Both extras are compelling enough on their own to sell these cards to the folks able to exploit their benefits today. And it's personally telling that I've put one card in my desktop workstation to drive a trio of monitors, and one into my HTPC, driving a 55" Samsung LED display."
Kevin writes: "Multi-GPU gaming was one of those things that seemed like a good idea for as long as it lasted. I mean honestly, the idea of a modular approach to graphics upgrades – be that SLI or CrossFire – was brilliant. I repeat, the idea was brilliant."
Im old school... when i hear the term SLI, I immediately think of 3dfx. I still have a pair of 12mb Monster V2's in an old rig. I never tried out the more modern take on SLI or Crossfire for that matter.
I mean, it was mostly for bragging rights. It was a very temperamental tech that improved with newer iterations, for sure. But folks like myself, who have used it, probably recall that troubleshooting was an integral part of the experience and the value that you got out of the setup was really low.
However, none of that mattered because it looked sick as hell on a well-built PC.
I remember doing my research at the time 😂 I got 2 GTX 460's, as they in SLI were meant to be better than the 480 at the time. Not all games were optimised at the time, which meant some games meant setting them up for 1 card alone. Never forget the time I came home from night shift, turned on my computer like normal, went and made a cuppa, come back and it was still off. Tried to turn on again, and one of the 460's caught fire... good times.
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