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For 5-boxing, would there be difference between these two choices? And which would be the best choice?
1x Asus ENGTX295 2DI 1792MB
Chipset (GPU) GTX 295
GPU 576 MHz
Memory 1792 MB
DDR3 2000 MHz
memory bus bandwidth 896 bit
Or
2x SLI Asus ENGTX260 896MB
Chipset (GPU) GTX 260
GPU 576 MHz
Memory 896 MB
DDR3 1998 MHz
memory bus bandwidth 448 bit
I want to know which I should go for to get the max performance. (I'm talking highest possible settings, 5x wow).
You're going to hear answers on both sides as there's good things to say about both choices. If it were me, I'd go w/ the 295, but I wouldn't call someone who got 2 of the 260's an idiot.
Find a good middle ground.. get one GTX285 - the fastest single GPU chip available. Unless you're running two 30" screens at 2560x1600 each, the videocard isn't as much of a bottleneck for multiboxing WoW as the CPU, memory, hard drive aspect of the system.
Since you're asking between the two, I'd take the GTX 295 over 2x GTX260's.
(5 boxing) - I went from 1 video card to 2 video cards and my FPS dropped considerably on all my wows (main and 4 slaves) - which I couldn't understand as I was offloading the 4 slaves to a different video card, so my FPS should have gone up, but it didn't...
To the best of my knowledge WoW always renders to the primary video device. If you have two video cards, one hooked up to a monitor and another to a second monitor and you have wow instances displaying on the second monitor (second video card) then the system draws the game on the first video card and then shunts it across the system bus to the second video card to display; dropping your performance considerable.
See Lax's post (number 4) for his explanation and there are some potential workarounds...
Dual cards/monitors, worse FPS?
and my original huh? post...
Nvidia GTX260 and 8800GT, 5 box, expected FPS?
As for SLI - I don't think a monitor hanging off the second video can be used when in SLI mode. The drivers disable it (this was 5 months ago, so it might have changed).
My 2 cents - 1 fat video card for 5 boxing wow.
SLI is a complete joke. Silencer is correct, go for X285.
nevermind, silencer has a good answer to everything :P