What to do if you’re caught in a budget and has to choose the best performing solution within the budget. This is something LegionHardware tested with two configurations within a budget of only $160. In the one corner we have a GeForce 7600GT costing about $160 while in the other we have two GeForce 7300GT which actually cost a little less. We usually question multi-GPU solutions with budget cards as they do not offer the same performance as a more powerful single card usually does, but it seems we should take a moment to reconsider perhaps. Which the people over at LegionHardware also had to do as they shared our initial thoughts.
They took two real budget cards, in this case two passive cooled Gigabyte 7300GT graphics cards, connected them in an SLI configuration and compared them to a GeForce 7600GT with the same total cost. The result was quite surprising as the two 7300GT cards had a hard time trying to keep up at default frequencies, but when overclocked they displayed considerably better performance with several tests than the more powerful GeForce 7600GT.
This clearly opens up some alternatives for people with a strict budget, and you should not despise the feeling of using an SLI system, even if it is a very low-end such.
