dual 7900gs or single 7900gtx?

thats waht alienware is currently offering. what do you think is a better choice?

 

which one is more expensive? usually, but not always, whatever is more expensive is the better item.

 

this been asked before.

if you're gonna get the 1920x1200 screen res. then get the dual 7900gs, the 7900gtx is more than doubled the tdp @ 45 vs the 20 required by the 7900gs, so personally i get the 7900gs SLI. the 3d mark 2005 score shows substantial amount of differrence 8500 vs 9900.

 

Could you give us some details about the notebooks? The m9700 is the only notebook they have with dual Go7900GS cards. However, it has only a single-core Turion 64 processor. I wouldn't buy anything unless it was dual core.

 

forget that question. i jsut emant in general. lets say all the laptop specs were the same which combinations would be better for gaming?

and heres another question. why are nvidia quadro fx 2500m so expensive? nvidia doesnt play it off as a gaming vid card. but is it?

 

No, it's a workstation card. That's why it's so expensive. It has all the features of the 7900GTX but optimizations for 3D modeling and things like that. Not to mention, it's certified to use for professional applications, and those applications are designed with cards like the 2500M in mind. It also caters to a different kind of person. That's why it's so much more expensive.

 

With two cards in SLI you will see a nice improvement since its two GS cards and not one. Whats really crazy are the machines with two 7900GTX cards-just finished building one-1gig of video in a laptop!

 

That's a common misconception. With SLI, you're not actually getting 1 GB or 512 MB of video memory. They're two separate frame buffers working in tandem.

 

The 2x 7900GS cards will definitely outperform a single 7900GTX. I have seen single 7900GS cards overclocked to speeds faster than the 7900GTX. The 7900GS though is roughly 20% slower than the GTX. Having 2x 7900GS cards in SLI will not double the graphics speed. With SLI its usually around 1.5x the power with having 2 cards instead of one.

 

That's another excellent point - 2 graphics cards != double the performance in a lot of cases. While SLI is cool and all, I personally would go for the single 7900 GTX, especially if you play games like Prey or Quake 4 that can fully take advantage of having a full 512 MB of video RAM.

It would be nice if you could purchase an SLI-capable system with only one graphics card in it and allow you to add a second one later if you so choose.

 

aha. so some say the SLI and others say the GTX. personally i was leaning towards the GTX

 

well if you plan on running MUCH higher res and AA then the sli will help, but the gtx will handle just about anything. If you play the gtx at 160x1200 max settings and the sli gs's you wont notice much if at all any diference. Now crank aa up and/or the res much higer and youll see the sli will fill the performance gap.