Hybrid setups require modded drivers though, a slight hassle that many people don't wanna go through, considering how few games actually use physx well.

Newer cards have been good at sli/crossfire btw. The 400's have close to 100% in a lot of games. The 5000's have maybe 70-80 I think. This is at 1920x1080 and above in intensive games.

Of course, research the increases in each individual card considered. While buying two new cards at once isn't a good idea unless you go for the top ones wher there is no single card equivalent, buying one to add to an existing card gives a great boost assuming there aren't any sli bugs.

But gtx 285's are still prettyexpensive. So you could probably sell it and bug a nicer new card.

My brother just told me that I screwed up big time on buying the 285 instead of going up for the 295 because it has 2 gpu cores, is this true. I'd believe it seeing the price on them.

Yes it is true, but no you didn't screw up, the 285 is a perfectly good GPU, and it has better performance to price ratio, only idiots and fools think that more performance is automatically better.

*facepalm*
Performance- operation or functioning, usually with regard to effectiveness, as of a machine
basically, effectiveness.

So you're saying that "better effectiveness" isn't better?

Think of it this way, Quad SLI sucks because it has terrible performance, while 285SLI is better so you actually end up with more upgrade headroom. Single GPU cards are also many times more stable and get better performance in older games.

However what I was actually saying was that the 295 wasn't worth the amount it costs, and I refuse to ignore price because I'm responsible.

single card sli vs having 2 cards in sli would give better performance (ie 2x 295 single gpu vs 1x 295 dual gpu) due to the bus speeds even if your secondary card only runs at 8x the combined transfer rate would be faster. the up side to having a dual gpu card though is there's virtually no latency between the two gpu's where as the other way there's a higher latency, also i'm not 100% on this but i would figure a dual 295 would have two slightly slower gpu's than having 2 295 single gpu's due to heat issues or pricing.

(dual vs single 295 being hypothetical)

the 295 is just two 280's, so two 285's > 295 obviously, while I find that the 295 it's self is slower than two separate 280's, as you suggest. (I think thats what you suggest anyway Organ :P)

yes that's what i mean

or if you have a motherboard that has 16x/16x/8x so you can run both cards at 16x. hypothetical of course though.

Yea, Organ is just saying even if you have a lower end motherboard it will still be faster than the 295.

with a higher end motherboard the extra 8x (PCIex2) lanes will add even more performance, this is typically found on LGA1366 motherboards.