 Welcome to the dual GTX 980 versus triple GTX 970 Showdown. Both of these solutions cost over a thousand dollars for the video cards alone, and bring a monstrous amount of gaming horsepower to the table, but only one can be victorious today. Stay tuned for the stunning conclusion, and also don't miss our journey back to the parking lot where it all started, for an outdoor unboxing of the Phanteks Enthui Evolve. Old-school LTT style. From December 13th to 20th 2014, you can save on select Intel CPUs, NUCs and SSDs with special holiday rebates from select retailers. Click now to learn more. Now I often get misquoted as saying that you shouldn't buy two graphics cards if there's a more powerful single GPU option available, but, and we've talked a fair bit about SLI scaling recently, including in this video right here, there is one exception to this rule that almost always holds true. The second tier, the one just under the flagship graphics card, is usually based on the same processing core, is cut down in a way that doesn't affect performance too dramatically, it overclocks like mad, and is much less expensive. So, if you can stretch your budget, two of those sometimes doesn't cost much more than one flagship card because they don't carry that best of the best price premium. But Linus, what if one top of the line or even two second fiddle graphics cards just isn't enough GPU for me? Well my first response to that would be, why the heck not? That's an awful lot of video card power. And my second response would be, I'm just kidding, I know you can never have enough video card power, especially if you want to game at 4K or at very high frame rates. I was just messing with you guys. So, let's take a look at the contenders today. Nvidia's top of the line, Uber Card du Jour is the GTX 980. It features a base clock of 1126 MHz, a boost clock of 1216 MHz, 4 gigs of GPU memory clocked at 7 GHz, and 2048 CUDA cores. Sounds awesome, right? Well it should because it costs over $550 each to pick up one of these puppies and just over $1100 for the two of them that you'll need to take advantage of, that ROG Swift 1440p 144Hz monitor, or that brand new 4K 60Hz gaming monitor if you want to play the latest AAA titles. But maybe there's another way. The GTX 970 by comparison is clocked at 1050 MHz on the core, has a boost clock of 1178 MHz, also features 4 gigs of GPU memory clocked at 7 GHz, and has 16,064 CUDA cores, less than the GTX 980, but it's not exactly a slouch either and it weighs in at only $340, meaning that three of these would actually cost less than two GTX 980s. So let's start with the raw FPS data here, shall we? Across the board, average frame rates were really close between our two test configurations on our Core i7-5960X Extreme Edition test platform. Tomb Raider continues to be the poster child for multi-GPU gaming with about a 20% performance advantage at a 10% lower cost for the three-way setup. Boo-yah! Far Cry 3 and Crysis 3 tell a different story however. Both show solid results for the triple config if we just look at the charts, but while sitting in front of them at 1440p was fine, so you high refresh rate gamers would be happy with this config, at 4K the stuttering and hitching was unbearable with three graphics cards, and Dual 980s delivered a much smoother gaming experience. The rest of our games, Dirt Showdown, Middle-Earth Shadow of Mordor, and Bioshock Infinite didn't have noticeable hitching or stuttering, but also didn't demonstrate the same performance advantage as Tomb Raider for our three-way configuration. Something I would have had to see if I was going to recommend three-way SLI for folks who play more than just the games that happen to run really, really well on it. Especially when you consider that a triple graphics card configuration has other disadvantages as well. In-game power consumption was actually closer than I expected, probably because the utilization of the third GPU is never going to be as much as the second, which is never as much as the first, so this was basically a draw, but both the temperatures at which our cards were running, and the experience of sitting there next to them were a little bit uncomfortable for me. Our 970 rig was much louder, and especially the middle sandwiched GPU ran much hotter than either of our better-spaced 980s, and that's with a fan blowing directly over top of them. Not to mention that two cards will take up fewer of the available expansion slots on your motherboard that you might like to use for PCI Express SSDs, sound cards, or other fancy new functionality for your system as it becomes available. So it's conclusion time. For gaming, I just don't think the added bang for the buck of the three-way config of second-tier cards compensates, whoops, for the disadvantages associated with this kind of a setup. You could possibly make an argument for it if you were planning to use your system for things other than gaming, like 3D rendering or cryptocurrency mining or something like that, but frankly, even then, the higher clock speed and additional CUDA cores of the 980s means that unless the 970s are scaling nearly perfectly, the performance is going to be similar anyhow, and by the time you're spending $1,000 on GPUs, what's another 100 bucks to get a much more elegant solution? So that's all there is really to it. This was a fun experiment, but the conclusion didn't shake the foundations of the pre-existing knowledge we had on the topic, it just gave us a clearer understanding of what folks who want to run at 2560x1440 144Hz or 4K 60Hz need to power their setups. Speaking of clearer understanding, we have a new sponsor online as Tech Tips that helps you better understand the guts of all your electronic devices, iFixit. You may know iFixit from their teardowns of a multitude of gadgets like their phones, like the iMac Retina 5K, their guide for which I actually followed to create my upcoming iMac 5K internals upgrade video, but what you may not know about them is that they also have a full lineup of professional electronics tools. The cornerstone of their tool lineup is the ProTech Toolkit, which includes 70 tools to assist you with any mod or malfunction on one of your little electronic gizmos. The ProTech Toolkit includes a 54-bit driver kit which features standard, specialty, and security bits. It's got ESD-safe precision tweezers, an anti-static wrist strap, or you can wear it on your ankle like I do, a bunch of prying tools, and both nylon and metal spudgers. I never leave home without my ProTech Toolkit as I can always find a use for it when I'm working with electronics, and you can purchase the kit over at iFixit.com slash Linus where it's available for only $64.95, which by the way includes a lifetime warranty. I actually didn't know that. But wait! If you use our offer code LINUS, you can actually save $10 on the ProTech Toolkit or any other purchase over $50. So if iFixit, you can fix it yourself, and if you guys don't believe this, obviously written by Nick, so like very strong endorsement of iFixit, it's actually all true in this case. I bought my ProTech Toolkit myself. I paid my own real money for it over a year ago, and it's just a fluke that they advertise with us now. I absolutely love my kit, and there are great guys over there. So I think that's pretty much it, guys. 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