Alright so I've been saving up to build a new PC. I built my first PC around the time the first i7s' were reasonable in price about 2 years ago. Served me great but it's showing age and I'm also looking into buying a new monitor. The newest rage seems to be these korean 27 inch IPS 2560x1440 monitors that go for around 400$ imported through Ebay. I'm either looking at upgrading when Haswell launches or this coming fall. My budget for the PC itself is around 1,200$-1,400$ not including harddrives/ssd and desktop memory, I already bought those components. I prefer Nvidia, so my two options seem to be a GTX 680 or 2 SLI GTX 670s'. Let's make no bones about it, I'm looking for a high end PC that can play all games currently at their max settings at that native resolution for this monitor. What do you think I should go with? I'm not really familiar with SLI so there's that.

Current theoretical build:

Whatever Haswell CPU is out

Whatever mobo that are comparable with Haswell that has SSD caching

Corsair 600T Case

The case seems like the biggest hang up. I currently have a full tower and I've never had to deal with building in a mid tower case. SLI with two big cards like that seems dicey. I plan on adding 4 side panel low rpm fans so the heat shouldn't be an issue. I would just go for a full tower but the only good ones for a reasonable price seem to be cooler master and I'm tired of LEDs on my PC, and they all have fucking LEDs.

Yeah PCs. Anyone got any input?

I would go with the one 680. A buddy of mine has one of those monitors and that card and can run whatever he throws at it. SLI may be more powerful in theory, but a lot of games have a shitty SLI profile and a lot of the times it is not worth the hassle that comes with having 2 cards (powering them, cooling them, lack of support from games, etc). You can have an easier time getting and potentially overclocking a 680 without a real practical performance difference.

Edit: Just as a note, I mean a 4GB 680, you are going to need that VRAM.

@shinboy630: What games have shitty SLI profiles?

There must be a way to disable the LED's and continue using your old case.
Also, it seems like a decent number of games don't play well with SLI. I'd just get a single 680. Or a 690 if your wallet is particularly loose at the moment.

@shinboy630: @believer258 said:

There must be a way to disable the LED's and continue using your old case. Also, it seems like a decent number of games don't play well with SLI. I'd just get a single 680. Or a 690 if your wallet is particularly loose at the moment.

If I upgraded my current monitor which is what needs upgrading the most my framerate would halve on my current PC. I have a 580 in my current PC but the cpu is first gen i7. Something I forgot to mention was that my current monitor is 3 years old, and has problems with the power prong on the back not wanting to stay in.

I would like to know what games actually have bad SLI optimization, google search told me Crysis had bad Crossfire support but nothing about SLI.

@thabigred said:

@shinboy630: @believer258 said:

There must be a way to disable the LED's and continue using your old case. Also, it seems like a decent number of games don't play well with SLI. I'd just get a single 680. Or a 690 if your wallet is particularly loose at the moment.

If I upgraded my current monitor which is what needs upgrading the most my framerate would halve on my current PC. I have a 580 in my current PC but the cpu is first gen i7. Something I forgot to mention was that my current monitor is 3 years old, and has problems with the power prong on the back not wanting to stay in.

I would like to know what games actually have bad SLI optimization, google search told me Crysis had bad Crossfire support but nothing about SLI.

The new Hitman for example had better performance with 1 card than 2 in SLI. Whilst scaling is better than it used to be, running SLI will be, at the least, an amount of effort more than single card. Might be a big amount, might be a small amount, but an amount it will be.

@AlexW00d: I looked into it and apparently the 780 is rumored to release along side Haswell, so there's that. I'll probably just wait for that.

As everyone else said, its better to go with one better card than two weaker cards. Some games will only use one card even in SLI and some games will straight up not work. Amnesia would load but only go about 1 fps and no picture actually showed up once in game. I turned off SLI and the game worked flawlessly. 
 
A lot of smaller team games or console ports can have problems with SLI/Crossfire. I think most games only get around 180% out of two cards anyway (versus one).