Best Video card\combo for gaming rig

[Dallascisco]

Building a rig for a client that will be playing SWTOR and Guild Wars 2. I'd like to know if I'd be better to go beefy single or slightly slower dual video cards for this rig. I have in on good authority that SWTOR isn't good with sli\crossfire but not sure about Guild Wars 2.

 

[Madmick]

How much are you looking to spend? The GTX 680 is the best card out right now. AMD's best competition for that is the Radeon 7970:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/5699/nvidia-geforce-gtx-680-review
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2402193,00.asp

 

[nickb64]

I would always go with a faster single card and avoid the little issues and annoyances of SLI/Crossfire.

I have no experience with either game.

 

[superjim]

For a client I would stick with a mid-level single card. Less components to fail and don't have to worry about their sensitivity to micro-stutter.

SWTOR is pretty tame, not sure about GW2. Guessing a 6870 could handle it. 2GB 6950 would be ideal if you can still find one.

 

[RavenSEAL]

3960X & Quad SLI GTX 680s

 

[joshhedge]

3960X & Quad SLI GTX 680s

Quad Crossfire 7970s because they MGPU scale better.

 

[guskline]

3960X & Quad SLI GTX 680s

Now THAT rig will put a SERIOUS dent in your wallet!

 

[Arzachel]

Guild Wars 2 looks like it'll eat up quite a lot of GPU power on highest settings, so a 6870 or maybe even a 6950 might not be enough. You'll probably will have to say how much you're willing to part with, though

 

[BallaTheFeared]

@ OP whats your budget?

MMO's like WoW and SWTOR want fast cpus, it's pretty much just as important as the GPU since anytime there are a lot of people on the screen its going to bottleneck. The faster your chip, the better the more demanding areas will be.

 

[Jaydip]

@ OP whats your budget?

MMO's like WoW and SWTOR want fast cpus, it's pretty much just as important as the GPU since anytime there are a lot of people on the screen its going to bottleneck. The faster your chip, the better the more demanding areas will be.

Pretty much this.

 

[RavenSEAL]

Fill out this form Dallascisco: http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2225141

 

[PrincessFrosty]

What resolution are you running at? The only resolutions that may get close to requiring multi-GPU are 2560x1600, or anything multi-monitor.

I'm guessing you're probably 1920x1080 or below in which case any high end GPU from the new generation will last you years just fine. You'll probably find that performance in MMOs these days is more likely to be limited by CPU anyway, unless you're running a decent CPU I wouldn't invest too heavily in an awesome GPU.

A good rule of thumb is never bother with multi-GPU when 1 GPU will suffice, I'd always recommend something like 1 high end card instead of 2 mid range cards.

 

[Dallascisco]

Budget for system is 2500-3000. I was more concerned with finding out if GW2 was SLI capable or not. I'm finding conflicting reports online with most stating it doesn't. This is going to be a sandy bridge system with an ssd and ddr3 1866 ram on a x79 sabertooth board so the video card will have nice fallback. I'm thinking a single 7800 or 7900 just to future proof a bit.

 

[Jaydip]

U can't future proof "future" A single 7800 won't be future-proofing.Buy a 7990 or a 690 and(both probably to be revealed shortly) call it a day