GPU question for WoW 10-15boxes

[SaraiE]

I am wondering if it is worth to buy a single GPU: the EVGA Titan (http://www.walmart.com/ip/Evga-EVGA-GeForce-TITAN-Graphic-Card-837-MHz-Core-6-GB-GDDR5-SDRAM-PCI-Express-3.0-x16-2QY3565/32817157) versus two EVGA GTX 680 4GB cards.
Which will be more powerful to run 10-15 instance of WoW, assuming one has the CPU, RAM and SDDs to support this.

Walmart has it at $1196, but I know someone that can get 25% off (she is an employee and she said it is a one-time deal), so it comes out to be around $900, cheaper than from Newegg and EVGA.


Thanks!

SaraiE

[MiRai]

The GTX 780Tis are newer, cheaper, and faster than the GTX Titan these days and the only issue you might run into is that the 780Tis have 3GB of video RAM, whereas, the Titan has 6GB. The Titan was a beast of a card when it was launched, but its price only warrants its excessive amount of VRAM these days (which I'll admit is sexy, but difficult for me to swallow).

It's not a bad card per se, but it's ~9 months old at this point and I would imagine that it could end up choking when running 15 clients using DX11 all at once -- That's just a lot of clients to be running off of a single GPU. If you're running DX9 at the moment and don't mind continuing to use DX9, then you should be able to get by with a single GTX 780Ti -- This is all just my guess, though.

Another option for you to maybe think about...

If your friend can get a discount like that on other cards, you might try to get two GTX 780s or 780Tis and pay just a bit more, but then you'd be able to split the load between each of the cards (assuming you have multiple monitors and the rest of the system to handle that many clients). I don't normally recommend splitting the load between GPUs unless it's necessary, but when running that many clients it's nice to give the GPUs a break.

[SaraiE]

Thanks
I found these:
1) http://www.walmart.com/ip/Zotac-ZT-70201-10P-GeForce-GTX-780-Graphic-Card-863-MHz-Core-3-GB-GDDR5-SDRAM-PCI-Express-3.0-x16-2RA1733/28816812 --$528
2) http://www.walmart.com/ip/Asus-GTX780-3GD5-GeForce-GTX-780-Graphic-Card-863-MHz-Core-3-GB-GDDR5-SDRAM-PCI-Express-3.0-2RG1582/28704383 -- $780
3) http://www.walmart.com/ip/Pny-PNY-GeForce-GTX-780-Graphic-Card-863-MHz-Core-3-GB-GDDR5-SDRAM-PCI-Express-3.0-x16-2RA1661/32814525 -- $599

I just don't understand the price difference among them and spec...all are 780s, 3GB

SaraiE

prices are before the 25% off...

[MiRai]

That's a tough call. ;)

I don't know why that Asus card is so overpriced, it's just a regular GTX 780 like the others you have linked. After the recent release of the 780Ti, all of the regular 780s went down to $500 (at least they should have). According to Newegg, the card looks to be EOL and discontinued (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814121769), and I don't know why Walmart hasn't dropped the price on it like it did to the others.

Is there an extremely soon deadline that you need to make this decision by? If not, I'd say maybe try and wait it out a week to see if any EVGA 780s come in stock or if that Asus card drops in price. I know that Zotac and PNY have both been around for some time now, but other than that, I don't know anything about them or the quality of their products.

[SaraiE]

Next week Friday is the end of the offer by Walmart to employees. So I will just wait then...:)

Thanks! You are a great help! I know ZERO about this card versus that card. :)

SaraiE

[rfarris]

The only other thing that I considered when I thought about buying a Titan was that it uses considerably less +12v power than the 780. (I solved that issue by buying a 1200w power supply. :) )

[MiRai]

The only other thing that I considered when I thought about buying a Titan was that it uses considerably less +12v power than the 780. (I solved that issue by buying a 1200w power supply. :) )
A lot of people way overestimate how much wattage they really need in their system. Having a large PSU isn't necessarily bad, but if you're not operating near capacity (80-90%) you normally get less efficiency out of it than if you weren't.

The stock GTX 780 (http://www.geforce.com/hardware/desktop-gpus/geforce-gtx-780/specifications), 780Ti (http://www.geforce.com/hardware/desktop-gpus/geforce-gtx-780-ti/specifications), and Titan (http://www.geforce.com/hardware/desktop-gpus/geforce-gtx-titan/specifications) all require a single 600W PSU according to nVidia's site -- That wattage is system-wide. You can probably add < 200W per card in addition to that (for SLI), because my power hungry system that has 3x GTX 580s in SLI uses < 900W while benchmarking them in Unigine Valley (and they're definitely being pushed hard).

I've never bothered to check the power usage while multiboxing, but the scene changes so often, causing the machine's load to fluctuate so much, that I doubt it sits above 900W for very long.

EDIT: Actually here's a really good chart (http://i.imgur.com/e4XfFnk.png) showing system-wide power usage from this review (http://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/gtx_780_ti_sli_geforce_review,1.html). Their 3-way GTX 580 numbers seem a little low. Maybe I'll have to test mine again.

[MiRai]

Alright, well it doesn't seem like those cards are coming down in price nor does it look like any other EVGA cards are going to be stocked before Friday.

To recap...

GTX Titan


Offers the most VRAM available on any nVidia card to date (6GB)
6GB is easily sufficient to 10 or 15-box while using either DX9 or DX11



Comes with a hefty price tag even after your discount
Is no longer king of the hill as far as video cards go and is 9 months old


GTX 780


Costs about half of the price of a GTX Titan



Only comes with 3GB of VRAM
3GB should be sufficient to 10 or 15-box with while using DX9


Other Thoughts on the GTX 780 if you can afford two:


Two GTX 780s could be used in SLI for a boost in performance (I have no figures for how much of a boost)
Two GTX 780s could be used separately to "split the load" of your Character Set across two monitors effectively giving you twice the performance of a Titan and still have 6GB of video RAM (this requires a special Window Layout)
SLI performance may vary and being forced to use a special Window Layout can feel weird


This is all the information that I can give and you'll have to decide from this unless someone has some actual real world performance data to share.

If you went with the EVGA GTX Titan, it comes with a standard 3-year warranty, with the option to upgrade to a 5 or 10-year warranty (for a price). If you chose the GTX 780, I'd go with the Zotac because they offer a standard 2 year warranty over PNY's 1 year warranty. It seems you can also grab an extended warranty from Zotac, as well, for a small price after registering the product on their site.

[Damons]

Nice summary Mirai.

Since I waited too long, the 770 cards went up in price today on Amazon. Argh.

[Multibocks]

I have two titans. I wouldn't recommend going above 15 clients on one machine.

[Quiding]

I have two titans. I wouldn't recommend going above 15 clients on one machine.
Is that on highest settings?
My old gtx 9800+ can run 5 at low settings (30fps slaves 60fps main) and GPU-Z is telling me im only using up 20-30% GPU Load (400mb used), with 2 Titans I can't imagine you can only run 15 clients? or will the extra clients add that much more?
I guess it must be the settings.

[Multibocks]

It's all based on what you feel comfortable playing. I tend to turn up the effects and dial down the view distance. I only run 13 clients, but I get a couple chugging frames per play session. When I had just 680s and two computers my experience was much better with only 5 clients on each computer. I highly recommend doing the mid level computer route with multiple computers vs the super computer route.