SLI vs Crossfire

[MonKass]

OK I`m on a budget and looking at upgrading my PC. (Currently a 2400 AMD, 9600xt, 512mb) I dont wanna spend more that £500 (yes I`m from the UK, and am tight).

So far I`ve come up with these options:

Op1 - ATI - Crossfire
HIS Excalibur ATI Radeon X800 GTO ICEQII TURBO 256MB - £140
DFI LanParty UT RDX200CF-DR Crossfire (Socket 939) - £158
AMD Athlon 64 3000+ Venice 90nm (Socket 939) - £93
1Gb RAM - £100ish
Total - £491

Op2 - Nvidia - SLI
BFG GeForce PCX6600 GT OC 128MB DDR3 - £140
DFI LanParty NF4 SLI-DR (Socket 939) - £123
AMD Athlon 64 3000+ Venice 90nm (Socket 939) - £93
1Gb RAM - £100ish
Total - £456

Please take into consideration that I`m into gaming like BF2 and DOD:Source. Also wouldn`t mind a look at Q4. I really want something thats going to last at least a year and I believe I can upgrade both the options to a 2nd GPU.

Which would you choose? or do you have a different option? Hope you can help.

 

[Dribble]

Instead of buying a second gpu you could always sell the first one and use the money you get for that to buy a more expensive latest gen one which will probably be faster, cooler, lower powered and have more features then sli'ing or crossfiring two cards.

Whatever you might as well buy the SLI option cause it's cheaper and spend £180 on a gpu instead of £140 which will buy you something like an X800XL (from somewhere like dabs, or lowestonweb).

 

[Munky]

I wouldnt go with either SLI or Crossfire, IMO it better to just upgrade a single card instead of getting a second one of the same kind. A 6600gt is still good for modern games at medium settings, but it's starting to show it's age, and definitely not worth more than $140(US). A second 6600gt will may nearly double your GPU power, but you still only have 128mb of effective video mem, so that will be a bottleneck in modern games at high settings. Overall, dual 6600gt's are about as good as a single 6800gt, so I'd save some money by not getting an SLI board and put it towards a better video card.

 

[MonKass]

Thanks for your responses.

I can see your points, but I failed to mention that my current motherboard is AGP. boo.