Is it better to have 2 decent video cards or one powerhouse video card?

I'm building a gaming computer for my own use and have picked a motherboard that will allow me to use two video cards. (Both PCI Express 2.0 x16)



Now, If I were to pick 2 decent video cards and 1 powerful card, and they basically were about the same if I went either way, (Like 2 decent = 1 great card) which is the better choice?|||It depends on which cards you're pairing. For example, I chose to pair two NVIDIA GTX 460 1GB cards in SLI because, combined, they perform better than a single GTX 480 at a slightly lower cost. I haven't read anything about the newer GTX 560 Ti cards vs. the GTX 580, but I'm guessing their scaling might be about the same. It's worth doing some research about.



I'm not as clear on how ATI/AMD cards perform when paired in a CrossFireX configuration.



One other factor might be whether a particular game you're interested in has optimizations for SLI or CrossFireX.



Hope this helped!



From the Conclusion section of the Tom's Hardware article referenced below:



"With an MSRP of $250 and a Web price around $230, GeForce GTX 460 1GB graphics cards were already known to be great mid-priced performers. Doubling these up in SLI gives us the same MSRP and Web price as a single GeForce GTX 480. But does this give us more performance? You bet!



The GeForce GTX 460 SLI configuration absolutely obliterates the GeForce GTX 480’s performance scores, landing a 26% performance coup de grace upon its big brother after continuously battering it with wins in every benchmark at every setting. That would put it in the same performance class as a certain $700 dual-GPU card, according to Don Woligroski’s recent review. But—at less than $500—it doesn't even need to compete there. While far-more-expensive solutions do have their own particular strengths, what we really wanted to know was where our $460 would be best spent, and today’s test revealed that answer."|||Generally it's better to get one good video card over two decent ones EXCEPT in cases where the "good" video card is the best on the market. In that case, that particular video card would carry an extra premium for being the "best" so for the same price you'd probably get more performance from two video cards.



Anyway, the best thing you can do would be to compare benchmarks between one good video card and two decent ones. That would tell you exactly which one is the best configuration.|||It's better to distribute the strain over 2 cards rather than one. It seems to work more efficiently that way as the work is done over 2 cores rather than a single unit taking the full strain. Be sure to provide enough power for it, and be double sure to make certain that you provide enough cooling!|||due to coding issues and driver issues in general one GPU is always better than two



obviously the are exceptions obvious 2 5770s would be better than one but if chooseing between 2 5770s and say a 6950 hd then go for the 6950|||l think it would be cheaper with the same performance to go with two descent vs one powerhouse card. I would get two geforce 460s as opposed to one 580, but that's just me