GPU for running 6 monitors

[Norrin]

Hey Guys
I currently run 6 monitors powered by a single AMD 5870 Eyefinity 6. For the most part I have been very happy with it.
However, more and more I am beginning to hate AMD and their crappy drivers of late.

My question is what would your suggestion for an upgrade?

More background as the question itself is super vague.


Totally forgot the specs. Sorry
Running a EVGA X58 SLI3 board. Fairly old.
First Gen Core I7-950
12 gig memory


Though I do enjoy a good mulitbox session, this rig is used mainly for work. Yes I do utilize all 6 monitors while working.
I do like that I can run a 5 box team full screen on separate monitors, and that since they are all on a single gpu ISBoxer has no problem switching to a main monitor.
The monitor switching, though I do really like it, would not be something I would hang my final decision on. Just a nice to have.

I don't plan to mine bitcrap at all.

I was looking into the Asus Rog Matrix R 280x as it will support full eyefinity 6, but they seem to be really hard to find. I also don't like that all this mining crap has inflated the prices of AMD cards.
I also don't plan (at this time at least) to run SLI/Crossfire. Peggle runs blazing fast on almost anything.

I look foward to hearing your feedback.

Thanks

[MiRai]

There's no nVidia GPU that can run 6 monitors by itself. This is something that AMD has locked down pretty well, and only recently, did nVidia double their output monitor count from 2 to 4. If you want 6 monitors with an nVidia card you're going to need two of them.

[Norrin]

Yeah I guess my real question is would be it better to get one AMD card that supports 6 or two GTX cards that each support 3.
I think I am leaning towards the two GTX 660 route. I want to keep costs down. Staying around the $500 target would be nice.
Just not familiar with GTX of late, and how they handle 3 monitors.

[MiRai]

I really can't recommend the GTX 660s because they have a gimped 192-bit memory bus -- Really, anything from the 6xx series is gimped in terms of what the 7xx series can do, but in order to move up to the 7xx series you're going to have to pay more.

The GTX 760 is probably a much better bet, and two of those would run you ~$500. The AMD R9 290 (non-X) is at ~$500 as well and it's got slightly better performance than a single GTX 760, but if you were to SLI those GTX 760s while gaming, then they're likely to come out as the top performer.

Here's a quick breakdown:

World of Warcraft
GTX 760 (http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/NVIDIA/GeForce_GTX_760/24.html)
R9 290 (http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/AMD/R9_290/23.html)

But since TechPowerUp didn't do a GTX 760 SLI benchmark for WoW, we'll use a different game just to show how the two setups compare against each other in terms of horsepower:

Tomb Raider (DX11)
GTX 760 (x2 SLI) (http://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/geforce_gtx_760_sli_review,8.html)
R9 290 (http://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/radeon_r9_290_review_benchmarks,20.html)

I just picked Tomb Raider for the hell of it because it was DX11, but you can look through the rest of those two Guru3D reviews if you want more of a comparison between the two different setups. Keep in mind that benchmarks can sometimes go either way when looking at certain benchmarks as some games tend to run better on nVidia hardware than AMD hardware, and vice versa.

I know you said you didn't want to run SLI (at least right now), but you can practically double your performance in games by doing so (or even split the load between the GPUs if necessary). I'll be honest though, if you're not accustomed to swapping in and out of SLI with so many monitors, it'll probably be annoying since you're likely to be bound to only two monitors when running SLI -- I'm not entirely sure which ports on the card are still active when running SLI, but I can run two monitors via DVI from the "main" GPU when running SLI with my 7xx cards. Upon disabling SLI you may have to readjust your monitor layout in Windows when they all come back online, but I've become so used to doing all these things it really doesn't bother me anymore because I get a ridiculous boost in performance with SLI (and I've done it so often that I'm damn good at it at this point).

[Norrin]

Thanks MiRai
That is exactly what I was looking for.