Is it better to purchase a 2gb video card or 2 1gb video cards?

I am about to build a new computer and have never gotten into the duel video card area before so I don't know much about it. Would it be better to purchase a single 2gb workstation video card or two 1gb video cards with SLI/Crossfire? Would the fact the 2 cards working together would have 2 process end up being more of a benefit than a card with double the memory?|||It depends on what you are going to do, as a rule 2 will always run faster than one, but then there is questions of 2 being a greater drain on other resources and of course generating twice the heat. I personally would run one, you will have far less problems with one, and any performance sacrifice will be negligable, compared to the hassles 2 cards can and probably will give you.

For yours I ran dual processors, very quick, but too much like hard work.|||IF UR A HEAVY GAMER THEN GO FOR 2GB NVIDIA GTX 580 OR 590 GOOD LUCK........|||The more memory on the card, the less the PC memory or page file usage will be used. A gig on a video card is more than enough for most games.



Having 2 cards in SLI/Crossfire gains an advantage that 2 cards will work to offload processing as well as PhysX rendering for Nvidia. This will improve frame rates, allow you to beef up eye candy. It also creates more heat and needs a good power supply.



The thing is, games need to support this feature for that setup to work. If you have 2 cards and a game doesn't support SLI/Crossfire, then you gain nothing.



This is your choice a good video card or 2 mediocre. You should read the forums and get ideas from what users are saying about the cards you are looking at.|||I would Definitely say buy the 2GB Video card.|||It really deppends on the cards you are getting. For example a last generation 1gb like a nvidia gtx 460 in sli will get better performance but won't be a nvidia gtx 580 a new 2gb card. Though new generation cards are better like 2 AMD 6850's will agian get an increase in performance and be much closer to a 2gb AMD 6950 but doesn't make the cut. so single cards are still better than two but, that is only cause many of the drivers aren't even out of beta stage so they are not really finished.



For auto cad you don't even need a 2 gb card you gust need a fast gpu so a 1 gb should do it. :D|||The 2 cards together do NOT add up the memory. It'll just be two 1 gb cards working as one, and if you hit your vram limit both cards will get bogged down just as fast as a single 1gb card. Always go for stronger single card so you have an upgrade path later to add another.|||Impossible to tell from this information. If you're only looking at the memory of the video card, you're missing the point. Focus on the GPU itself, not the amount of memory the video card has.|||buy amd a8 3850 processor and 2gb graphics card and mobo from asus (becoz u need good bios for setup dual gpu and overclock)

becoz amd a8 3850 has in built gpu + graphic card gpu + 2gb memory ( bcoz if u ad two 1gb graphic card you will still end up with 1gb memory)

hence two gpu and 2gb memory|||The memory of the video cards is the least thing you should be worried about. Still, let's say you wanna crossfire 2 cards. The card you are going to connect to the 16x PCi slot in your motherboard is important. If that is 2 gigs- only those 2 gigs will matter. The memory of the other card you connect in the 4x PCi slot, is not used and therefore is useless. So make sure your primary video card's memory is big.