Is it better to have 2 decent GPUs or 1 really good one?

[SirDigby]

Hi guys,
Me and my friend were talking about GPUs on Skype because I'm upgrading mine in July and he's building one soon. My setup is basically a B75M motherboard with a GTX 770 but my friend thinks that having two GTX 660s will be better, but would also require a Z87 to support the SLI. What is better performance-wise and efficiency-wise?

 

[GhostRyder]

Here is what passmark scores those two cards you mentioned.
GTX 660
http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/gpu.php?gpu=GeForce+GTX+660
GTX 770
http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/gpu.php?gpu=GeForce+GTX+770

This is only to give you a basic reference point. Having 2 GTX 660s versus just one 770 in my opinion would be a bad choice mostly because the game has to support SLI and scale well for it to be better than the single 770. On top of that, they would be very close matches in performance as is (SLI 660 vs 1 770) so the choice I would make would be the GTX 770.

 

[St1ckM4n]

One powerful is better than two less-powerful. That's the blanket statement. Reasons:

• Less power drained.
• Less heat output.
• No need for expensive SLI/Xfire mobos and PSU's.
• Driver support, game support.
• If SLI not available, performance isn't halved.
• Space in case.
• Dual-GPU's share the VRAM.

The only times when two is better than one, is if you're trying to do something specific. E.g.:

• You already have one GPU. Adding another will match/exceed the performance of a single-GPU that'd cost way more.
• A particular dual-GPU setup for the budget you have is a lot more powerful than single-GPU, and performance is key for you.
• You get to the high-performance levels, where a R9 295X2 isn't feasible but two R9 290's is okay.