Not sure how to SLI or even if i should help please

[Savi]

So I am not sure if i should SLI, I need a little more GPU power or memory, want to play a nicely moded Skyrim with out any major fps drop. Every other game I play has no problem at all. just when I mod up Skyrim does it slow down lol

This is my PC

i7-2600K 3.40 GHz (did not OC it, also stock cooler)
ASUS P8P67 DELUXE <REV 3.0> LGA 1155
G.SKILL Ripjaws X Series 8GB (2 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) (Model F3-12800CL9D-8GBXL)
EVGA GeForce GTX 570 HD Double Shot 1280 MB
Corsair AX 1200 Watt ATX 80 PLUS Gold
Crucial M4 SSD 256 GB
WD 2 TB Black
Windows 8 (With Stardock's Start8)

I play games at 1920×1080 @ 60hz
and Skyrim is installed on my SSD

Now I really dont know if i should buy a new GPU or buy a 570 and do SLI. My budget would be in the $300 - $350 range max, Now the question I have is would I need to find the exact same 570 to SLI or would any 570 work? really no clue on that any help would be nice thank you

 

[EvilViking]

Sell your 570. And buy two 7950s for $400.

 

[Araxie]

1280mb of vRAM its even short for no modded Skyrim with the oficial High Ress texture pack.

you can mix any other 570 to SLI even any other brand. but at this moment i would not recommend a 570SLI setup... sell your card and buy a GTX 760 4GB model and you will have TON of extra power to move skyrim with the amount of mods you want, also buy a Hyper212+ And overclock that Chip to say 4.2 - 4.4GHZ. you will notice a big bump in performance in all your games.

but if you can extend a bit more your budged (with the help of sell your card on 120$ +/-) to say 380$-400$ you can pick a good GTX 770 with you can even have better performance.. if you planning to HEAVY mod skyrim that will use more than 2GB vRAM then wait a bit more try to find a GTX 770 4GB This Gibabyte 770 4GB sound good at 450$.

i would prefer to extend a bit more and shoot directly for the GTX770

 

[acid_burn]

Your fps drop is likely due to not enough vram, adding another 570 will not help. Buy a new card with more vram.

 

[Araxie]

Sell your 570. And buy two 7950s for $400.

Yup and thats mean Play Skyrim choppy. red side have to be away from skyrim and bethesda games..

 

[wonderfield]

AMD's mostly resolved frame pacing issues in Skyrim, to the extent that it's mostly comparable to SLI. Last I looked, anyway.

That said, there's absolutely no reason to go from one single GPU configuration to a two-way configuration with completely different cards. Strongly prefer single-GPU to multi-GPU always. Spend as much as you can reasonably afford on a powerful single-GPU card; use SLI/Crossfire strictly as a potential future upgrade path or unless there's no single-GPU card fast enough for your needs.

Skyrim will perform very strongly on a GTX 770, but as mentioned above, buy the fastest single-GPU card you can reasonably afford.

 

[Savi]

fast response!! ty buying a cooler for the CPU is something I would have done long ago but really never pushed the CPU that hard lol. But I will get one now for sure, Hyper212+ looks to be great and cheap to compared to a Corsair H100i

On the GTX 760 4GB cards I read that those cards done have enough power to even use 4gb, was this post Is that true? because I found this card and it looks really good the memory is 256bit so it should be able to use all 4 gigs no? still so much to learn about hardware hard to keep up lol

760 looks to be a winner but will do some more reading, and see if i can get a 770 instead. Last few years I have tired to stay away from ATI cards, mainly because I always read bad things about there driver release's lol.

 

[LigTasm]

570 has enough GPU power, but not enough Vram. I play with 17 high-res texture mods in addition to the official packs, and I can pretty easily max out my 7950 with only 4xAA. However, a single 7950 at 2560x1600 I never see above 65% GPU usage as the engine is not terribly demanding other than Vram.

AMD's mostly resolved frame pacing issues in Skyrim, to the extent that it's mostly comparable to SLI. Last I looked, anyway.

Using 13.8 Beta 2 my 7950 crossfire is still stuttery in Skyrim. It will not be solved until the DX9 segment of the frame pacing drivers come out I think.

 

[wonderfield]

"Not powerful enough to use the memory well" isn't a universal truth. If computational demands are low and memory needs are high, a relatively slow GPU isn't really going to hamper the effective use of a relatively large amount of memory. It's true only generally speaking, and a heavily-modded and texture-packed Skyrim is a clearly exceptional case.

I think there are severe pitfalls to piling on that much texel density, but if that's what you want, a lot of memory is going to benefit you there. Whether you need 4GB, however, is questionable.

 

[ccityinstaller]

fast response!! ty buying a cooler for the CPU is something I would have done long ago but really never pushed the CPU that hard lol. But I will get one now for sure, Hyper212+ looks to be great and cheap to compared to a Corsair H100i

On the GTX 760 4GB cards I read that those cards done have enough power to even use 4gb, was this post Is that true? because I found this card and it looks really good the memory is 256bit so it should be able to use all 4 gigs no? still so much to learn about hardware hard to keep up lol

760 looks to be a winner but will do some more reading, and see if i can get a 770 instead. Last few years I have tired to stay away from ATI cards, mainly because I always read bad things about there driver release's lol.

I would personally buy a 7950, like the MSI TF3 that is based on the 7970PCB, and o/c the snot outta it..These cards will very easily hit speeds that make them faster then a 7970Ghz card, even if it's a poor o/c'er..Plus the 3GB of Vram should be plenty even with a lot of Modding..You can get one for under $200 after MIR if you watch the sales, and you get some free games as well...

There is no reason to spend another $120+ on a 760 4GB, which isn't going to be any faster IMO..

 

[Savi]

I would personally buy a 7950, like the MSI TF3 that is based on the 7970PCB, and o/c the snot outta it..These cards will very easily hit speeds that make them faster then a 7970Ghz card, even if it's a poor o/c'er..Plus the 3GB of Vram should be plenty even with a lot of Modding..You can get one for under $200 after MIR if you watch the sales, and you get some free games as well...

There is no reason to spend another $120+ on a 760 4GB, which isn't going to be any faster IMO..

mmm I will think about a 7950, I have been thinking and reading up on a bunch of stuff last few days and with BF4 recommended system specs needing 3gb ram I am starting to think I might be better off waiting for the next gen cards, that would actually give me time to save up money for one of the higher end cards to. I think AMD will be giving out info on thre next gen cards end of this month so might be smart and not jump the gun like i usually do lol