Not that the 295 is a bad card, but the 4 and especially 5 series and soon to be 6 or 7 series whatever they call it, just offer so much more performance, use less power(more or less) and run cooler(more or less) I would go with win 7 64 bit, and go for a GTX580 3gb if you can afford it, or one of the fancier cards, there is lots to choose from, 560Ti or 560 448 are best bets for performance/$ but sheer performance would be 560 2 win, 580 3gb or 590, 2 sli lower cards as 560Ti are sick fast as well. All depends on the coin you can throw around. I would wait as long as you can for all the new Radeons to come out, and Nvidia should be showing thier new stuff soon enough, I would make up my mind then.
Dont forget SLI scaling depends on the card, generation, and most importantly the game/drivers, I know many of my buds that use 200-400-500 sereis that have performance issues going through different driver sets in RAGE, Crysis 2, Skyrim, and even BC2, where they would get 0 perforamance benefit over a single card through multiple driver sets, nothing is perfect after all, dont count on something that relies on drivers to work well, untill there is a 100% hardware based in the card itself, I personally will not spend that kind of $ on cards that may not work at least 80% of the time better then a single card no matter what I am doing.
Example a dual core vs quad core cpu, the scaling or IPC is just very reasonable on a quad core vs the dual and only make sence to pay the extra costs to do that, so why can it not be like this in SLI or Crossfire?
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