Single or SLI?

[Groundbound1]

Ok. I usually try to stay a little (ok ALOT) behind the curve when it comes to upgrades, mainly to keep costs down, but also to build off the knowledge that others aquire and share. It's time again for me to plunk down a few bills and breathe a little bit of new life into this antiquated rig of mine.

This round, I'm looking to upgrade my video card, and I find myself faced with one of the more important decisions in life.

A single card or two?

A little background for those that might help me through this tumultuous time.

My current specs are as follow:

An Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe
An AMD 4400+ X2 (clocked stockly ATM )

Cooled by a Zalman 9500A

2GB of Corsair XMS (2X1GB)

A Sapphire HD3870

And a nice new Ultra LSP650 to feed it all. (still in transit)

I currently only use my "gaming rig" *cough*cough* for COD4, Crysis, and FS9. All of which are quite playable on a 21" CRT @ 1856X1392, but never satisfied, I'd like more!

Now I made myself a promise a LONNNNG time ago, that any money I spend on upgrading, would come from offing any older surplus parts I have, (an "out with old" kind of thing)
and after taking stock of what I no longer use, I should easily be able to come up with $150-$200 when I'm ready to leap.

With $150-$200, I could net one pretty darn fine, not so old single card, or two cards, slightly older still, but not outdated by any means. Either way, I'm sure I can beat the 3870 I have now. If a multi-card solution is the way to go, they'll have to be Nvidia cards, as Crossfire isn't supported on this board.

[Rich H]

Well, FS9 doesn't utilise SLI, and I think with your price range, you'd get more performance with a single, more powerful card than two slower cards in SLI. You could get the GTX 260 in your price range.
I can't really say about ATI cards though, I don't really know about them.

You'll have to shop around for the best price, but here are some 260s:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductLi ... 60&x=0&y=0

[Groundbound1]

In case anyone else is trying to make the same decision, I though I'd share this.