You got it right, phat. I just wanted to warn everybody to hear on unexperienced sli fanboy friends, who never got to know about sli and say, that bf3 is the best graphics and most demanding game. If someone give advice to update a gtx 285 with an additional one, I have to say, that such a guy is not the right one to talk to.
First, get a single card, which run everything sufficiently and then start building your sli maschine. There is no doubt about some more performance, bit the load of your cards do not tell you 1:1 the performance increase. For 3 monitors you need for sure more graphics power, but first of all more vram. What I want to say: built up an sli with 2 x 580s with 1.5 gb each and max out to multi monitors, you will see the limitations in vram. You can add 2 more cards and will never solve the initial problem of vram texture loading.
2 x 680 in triple monitor resolution will not run as smooth as 2 ati hd7970. They simply do not have enough vram to handle all the load, which is instantly needed from the game. Every load from normal ram through the bus is too slow and you get stutters or whatever. For cod, even in normal 1080p resolution, a 1,5 gb card will cause some stutters. I maxed out everthing in this resolution and also have 2.5gb load, but my card can manage it.
Nevertheless, sli is helpful for multi monitors, but the efficiency of that technology is forcing me to say: It is damn expensive and the tech needs rework. The data buses for every component should be as fast as the bus between gpu and its vram. Efficiency of this can only increase, if this happens.
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