Should i crossfire or get a better video card?

Will running crossfire on a 6950 be better than asus matrix gtx580 platinum?



and if crossfire, what video cards?|||Yes... if you're looking for RAW performance it's always better to get 2 cards that are just a bit less than half the price of the top of the line model. Two 6950's in crossfire will come close to a 6990. You wouldn't think so, but a single 6990 is slower than two 6970's in Crossfire.



This is a rule of thumb. You could take a 5970 that has two Cypress XT cores and clock them to the same speed as a single 5870. The Cypress XT based 5870's in Crossfire clocked to 850mhz will always beat a 5970 that clocked to 850mhz.



However, the best thing to do is just to buy the best single card solution you can buy. You can add a second card in the future when the price of the card comes down. If you plan to do that, make sure you buy a power supply that will support two cards.



The other drawbacks of dual card solutions include more heat and higher power consumption. In addition to that Crossfire and SLI aren't consistent, not all games will see an 80% performance boost. Some games only see a 30%-50% increase and there are games like WOW that see barely a performance increase. Finally, Sli and Crossfire both have issues with Microstuttering.



The truth and only truth to video cards is, you're buying a card to suit your Display resolution. For a 1920x1080 monitor you won't see any difference by going above a Radeon 6970 or a GTX 570, for a 1680x1050 monitor a single Radeon 6850 or a GTX 560ti will max every thing out.



I would just get an EVGA model because they have the best customer support. On top of that EVGA uses reference cards and most of the watercooling blocks are made for those cards. Otherwise I would get the MSI Hawk since it's clocked higher and it doesn't have that large cooler. I'm not sure if you could ever run the matrix in SLI because of the size of the cooler. You would have to buy the right motherboard for that.



The GTX 580 by it's self needs a 650w power supply, the 6950's in X-Fire would need 750w.|||Two 6870's will beat an overclocked GTX 580.





The Asus matrix is another marketing ploy by Asus so they can have one of the best cards on teh market. The difference between the Matrix and a regular GTX 580 is nothing you will notice. Maybe 5% at the most.|||If you're asking this and think the 2500K and 2600K are the same, then it's clear that you're NOT building a Video Editing rig and you're probably trolling.|||GTX 580 ?



Are you mad ??



You need the GTX 590 !



It's the world's first and only dual core GPU ~!



And did I mention it's quiet ??



Looks, and sounds sexy.