 Now this video is going to be a bit of a look at SLI scaling on the GTX 550 Ti. Now SLI has been a big story for Nvidia since they first released it with the 6800 series. However, not every card necessarily makes sense to run an SLI. So I've always been of the mind that if there is a better card than the one that you have that is as good as two of the one that you have running an SLI, you're probably usually better off to go with the single more powerful card versus the two slower, weaker cards running an SLI. So I wanted to take a quick snapshot of some DirectX 11 titles. So the ones that I've gone with are Hawks 2, Lost Planet 2, and Metro 2033. And I compared four different scenarios. So I compared a single GTX 550 Ti Cyclone 2. So that is a slightly overclocked card. I compared that running an SLI with a GTX 550 Ti reference card. I compared a GTX 560 Twin Frozer 2. So once again, this is a slightly overclocked card. But since neither of these carry a price premium over the reference cards, I see no reason to necessarily bench with reference cards. And the last one that I included was the GTX 570. So the reason I've gone this route is that the cost of a single 550 Ti is significantly lower than anything else on the table. However, the cost of two of them together actually lands somewhere in between a 560 and a 570. So that's why I wanted to test the single GPUs that are available on either side of the price bracket of this dual GPU solution. Now, the upgrading guys will say, well, yeah, but what if I wanted to upgrade to one later? Then my response would be, well, then what you really should have done was saved a couple extra bucks to buy something else in the first place. If you need more performance, then buy something with more performance. So here we go. Why don't we have a look at the benchmarks that I was able to run here? And we'll start with Hawks 2. So in Hawks 2, you can see that the GTX 550 Ti at about 85 frames per second actually scales incredibly well in this particular game. So that's like 90% scaling or so and actually performs right exactly where it's supposed to be in between the 560 Ti and the 570. However, even this is an ideal scenario. An ideal scenario has the 550 Ti performing about where it should in terms of the pricing of this solution. So you're going to see that the problem with SLI is that it doesn't always scale in an ideal fashion. So right here, our 550 performs about where it should with respect to a 560 and even a 570. But the SLI solution, while costing more than a 560 and consuming more power than a single 560, actually doesn't even perform as well. And remember, the 550 Ti SLI solution is about as expensive as in between these two. So really, it should be right in between them. It should be around 50 FPS, but it's about 10 to 12% slower than that in Lost Planet 2. And now let's have a look at the last one that I ran here, which is my Metro 2033 benchmark. So here, I've got it running at normal quality with tessellation on and zero times anti-aliasing. All of these benchmarks are at 1920 by 1200, by the way. So you can see the 550 Ti is right here. 550 Ti SLI really doesn't scale that well compared to where it should be, which is around 90 FPS. So once again, we're looking at like a 20% performance delta difference between where it should be to justify the price versus where it is when it doesn't scale quite as well as it could. So basically, the conclusion of this is that the 550 Ti, if you do buy one and you find yourself needing some more performance, yes, you can get additional performance and you can go from what I would consider basic playable to very, very playable in a demanding game like Metro 2033 at full HD resolution. However, if you know you need the performance, you're going to be playing demanding games at HD resolution, then just get a 560 Ti, do yourself a favor and buy the right card in the first place because even though once in a while, and this is sort of the exception, not the rule, the 550 Ti SLI setup will outperform a 560 Ti, you're going to get a more consistent overall experience with a single more powerful card versus two more entry level cards running in tandem. So thanks for checking out this video on Linus Tech Tips. Don't forget to subscribe. And for more right for more unboxings, reviews and other computer videos.