Don't do it! SLI is a headache, a lot of faff with sometimes zero improvements over a single card (and even the occasional performance hit! :confused:).

And while only having 3.5GB of full-speed VRAM isn't much of an issue for single-card 970 users, you will find your cards thrashing against the limit in SLI, as they'll both be sharing a single 3.5GB+0.5GB pool.

Sell your old 970 for ~£150 and with the £188 for this, you're on £338 already - just £22 more gets you a GTX 1070, which has a huge performance boost across all games without depending on SLI support, and also uses even less power than a single 970.

Good deal. Superb card, runs quiet and handles everything I can throw at it in 1080p on ultra. The 970 is becoming the new budget card of choice I think.

https://www.nectar.com/collecting-points/brands/currys
Nectar is offering 8 points per pound at Currys right now if you order online.
As 2 points = 1p, that's effectively 4% back in nectar points.
You would get 1496 points worth £7.48.

970 SLi on a 4K resolution works beautiful here, you don't even have to use AA at this resolution as jagged edges are non existent / you can't see them, at all.

Mind you, I'm only playing GTA, Fifa & Hearthstone. Saying that, I'd probably grab a single GTX 1060 if I had the choice right now, less power being used and less heat, not to mention more memory for the large resolution.

Hopefully it won't be long before we see some affordable 4K resolution graphics cards.

Apart from the fact you are being incredibly rude, you are also incredibly hard to understand.

Radeon HD 7970
GHz Edition 22 June 2012

AMD 280x
8 August 2013

Geforce 970
September 18, 2014

AMD 380x
19 November 2015

So that's 2 years for the 7970, and the 280x, which was rebadged 7970, is simply a year old.

But no, the 380x was released a year later.

The 7970 was a relevant card at the time.

You can tell me to "stop posting" all you want, but you are simply wrong here.

True, but I imagine production runs for the 900 series have stopped so it'll only go so low before the price plateaus. And by the time it drops further we'll be a few generations along. Regardless at the moment the 1060 cards are better buys if you're starting fresh.

I mean, you can see how 170 for a used card won't last, right? New at 187...

But yes, the prices vary at the moment as the stock of 1060/1070/1080 are not fully hit yet.

As long as you don't expect perfect SLI scaling then I don't see the issue. The AAA games that you're trying to improve performance (witcher/GTA) it works well on and other games where the support isn't great a single 970 is more than fine at 1080p and even 1440p for the most part. Of course the best solution is sell the 970 and buy lump some more cash toward a 1070 BUT not everyone wants to go through that hassle.
Wish that was a common price as I'd honestly pick one up used myself. Sadly most used prices are nearer the £170 mark.

When do you plan on selling it? Because the 7970 was relevant when the 970 was released. If you wait a year to sell the 970, a very common card compared to the 7970 in terms of total sales, you may find the market to be extremely saturated.

I just bought a 970 for 100 2 weeks ago.

I bet i get 100+ from my 970 when i sell it.

I sold my 7970 for 220 when the 970 was released...

I mean, I can't follow what you are trying to say very well... But if you think the 970 second hand market will stay above 100+ in a years time, you will be sorely mistaken.

I am against buying a second 970 to use in SLI. I think it's a waste of money. You would get more performance/value out of a 1070, which can be purchased by reselling an existing 970 and spending the 187.91 saved on this card.

If you are are seriously considering buying this card for SLI, I would suggest you take a second and consider your options.

Sell your first card and take this 200 quid, put that 320-330 quid toward a 1070.

The 1070 beats 970 SLI in games that support SLI, and it tears the 970 to shreds in games that don't.

I'd save for a 1070 as well, no doubt about it. If you have a 970 and can get another one second hand, it might be worth it, but things have moved on.
I have to say though, I had 970 SLI and now I'm on 1070 SLI. It still has a place and depending on your requirements it can still be perfectly viable from a value for money point of view.
The 'con' of SLI and crossfire is the idea that you can pick a cheaper card up later on and double your frames for not a lot of outlay. The truth is that by the time you're looking at that 2nd card later on down the line, things have changed.
Tech moves quickly and to be fair even with the 970 SLI v 980 TI comparison don't forget that the 980TI came out about 9 months after the 970.
If you want to SLI, work out the cost/benefit for the resolution and games you want to play.
A single card is plug and play and you'll always get what you pay for. With SLI/Crossfire there are compromises.
To say that it's hardly ever worth it is just a simplification and most PC gamers are used to having to tweak things and wait a month or so for patches and profiles to make a game truly playable anyway,

Well, thank goodness you haven't fallen into the choice-supportive bias trap! :laughing:

correct, sli works best at the higher setting and highest resolutions. No point to use sli on 1080p or 1440p at lower settings, these test from post 17 are very misleading and looks obvious to me that who ever performed the tests does not know what he is talking about and surely he is not even a gamer, he presented the tests in a totally wrong way confusing people of what in reality an sli can really do.

​I disagree, I've got 980 Sli and the difference in Witcher 3, GTA or BF4 (Which I play a lot of) is massive with Sli enabled or disabled. Bare in mind I do play at 3440x1440.

I've had two 2gb 560Ti in SLI and they pumped out 80% extra fps in all games, including GTA5 which looked amazing, and that was an amazing achievement considering how old the cards were. Therefore I have nothing but good memories of SLI. I currently have a single 970 and will be looking to add another one when requirement arrives. This card would be my pick. I dont know how 970 SLI would be any less compatible than 560TI in SLI I had.

almost all old a new game should do the 21:9 aspect ratio automatically if you use a 21:9 monitor. Saying so, any 16:9 monitor would do any preset ratio and resolution in within the max res. of the monitor. If not, you need to make a custom made resolution which can be anything in within the max res. of your monitor, these custom made res. will all appear in the game for you to choose. To get the proper aspect ratio of anything you set up previously you need to use NO SCALING AND OVERRIDE SCALING MODE SET BY GAMES AND PROGRAMS in the NVidia panel. Some games, but only found on TOMB RIDER 2013 so far, the resolution needs to be preset on the desktop first in order to get the right resolutions at the right scaling and aspect ratio

As someone who paid full retail for this same card approx 12 months ago at the same shop, this is an awesome price, I usually play in 1440p and most things run perfectly in ultra settings, weirdly going from 1080p to 1440p didn't affect fps as much as I would of thought, since the drivers have matured I'm finding things run better at 1440 than they did at 1080 when I first had it! Recently bought a second hand Gsync monitor, personally id you got one of these cards already id upgrade the monitor, I was skeptical but its made a huge difference

Yes true. Its good if its used. Like i have a 21:9 monitor but a headache trying to get games to run at that ratio. Even if they do the in game sequence is still 16:9

I do not use DSR, I only mentioned that for these people that might wanna test any sli at the higher resolutions

Great card even in single config, this is a great price also

DSR is one of the very "headaches" that comes with SLI!
It was only recently that SLI+GSync+DSR got supported by NVidia, which is some two years after the release of the card...was one of the reasons for using SLI - hi res rendering and Gsync to make it smooth - but they broke it within a few driver releases and only restored it March/April this year!
As an early adopter of both GSync and SLI 970's (both bought on day of availability in the UK) was not very happy with that from NVidia.

Having dropped my second 970 in the last few months, bar bench marking I notice no real difference at all in any games I play performance wise @ 1080P which is all I play at. Never changed any settings of the games I already had installed and the performance is in no way degraded from a playability standpoint - maybe I am dropping a few frames, but it's nothing noticeable.
There are games that get a considerable boost from SLI - Tomb Raider springs to mind from reviews I read a while back which gets you nearly twice the FPS over a single card, but you are still way above 60FPS on a single card anyway...

list these not too many please but tested by you. Might be your pc that might not support it. Many do insist to run the older 500 fiat engine in a Lambo body thinking to get the same performance of a real lambo, that is the main problem why a powerful sli like the 970 cannot work well in many games. Also as I previously mentioned it work best on the higher settings and higher resolutions as it uses less cpu power, try to believe. DSR on a 1080p monitor can make the trick for a proper testing

Good find. Thanks OP!

Worth it for SLI, and if you can't drop the extra cash on a 1060. Nice find.

​
All of that doesn't change the fact the game needs to support it and not many do

sli with the gtx970 is fine with many games and it does also use full 4gb vram without any issues at all. The slightly slower +512mb does not give any issues at all . These people saying rubbish do need to change their cpu for a better one. 970 sli needs a good push from a good cpu. Also, for the sli to work well, settings should be as high as possible and usage of higher resolutions will also help a lot, that is what it is for an sli after all. At 1080p or lower and low settings the sli is worse than using 1 gpu and in most of the games, saying so the better the cpu the better the push
Anyway, I got a 970 sli. My suggestion is, go for the gtx1060 if you need a single gpu

Yeah, was reading some benchmarks yesterday where out of 16 modern games, only 6 games supported SLI/Crossfire. :-(

Don't do it! SLI is a headache, a lot of faff with sometimes zero improvements over a single card (and even the occasional performance hit! :confused:).

And while only having 3.5GB of full-speed VRAM isn't much of an issue for single-card 970 users, you will find your cards thrashing against the limit in SLI, as they'll both be sharing a single 3.5GB+0.5GB pool.

Sell your old 970 for ~£150 and with the £188 for this, you're on £338 already - just £22 more gets you a GTX 1070, which has a huge performance boost across all games without depending on SLI support, and also uses even less power than a single 970.