Crossfire, or not to Crossfire - that is the question

[Grimspoon]

You cannot do it Captain, she don't have da powa!

For real though, youre going to have to upgrade that as well for dual-GPU. I would have to say at least 750W.
(You MIGHT be able to skim by with 600 or 650... but 750 should give a decent buffer ---- buffer = more important than you think...)

Ok cool, not a problem. Think I need a new PSU anyway. Where can I get my hands on one of those Aerocools Joker? Esquire?

Yeah You'll def have to upgrade the psu mate.
That said you can get 700w Aerocool psu's for around R699. They are great, I've used plenty of them in different builds.



http://www.guru3d.com/article/radeon-hd-5850-review-crossfire/9

Its either get another GPU + PSU and possibly a SSD, or possibly upgrade my entire rig. Still not sure if that is really necessary. I got a refund on my POS iMac, so I was toying with the idea of totally upgrading my rig.

If I did, what would you recommend Joker?

I should probably start my own thread

 

[The Joker]

Ok cool, not a problem. Think I need a new PSU anyway. Where can I get my hands on one of those Aerocools Joker? Esquire?



Its either get another GPU + PSU and possibly a SSD, or possibly upgrade my entire rig. Still not sure if that is really necessary. I got a refund on my POS iMac, so I was toying with the idea of totally upgrading my rig.

If I did, what would you recommend Joker?

I should probably start my own thread

lol yeah probably a good idea xD
Send me you're budget and we can work something out
I think doing a full new rig is def the way to go, its a good time to upgrade with Christmas right around the corner and plenty of pc games coming out

 

[Grimspoon]

lol yeah probably a good idea xD
Send me you're budget and we can work something out
I think doing a full new rig is def the way to go, its a good time to upgrade with Christmas right around the corner and plenty of pc games coming out

I start a new thread for this

 

[Fenix_ZA]

See my thread has been hijacked.:wtf:

Lol, no worries, any comment is welcome, a lot of users have questions pertaining to crossfire. I have a Corsair GS600 though, and calculations suggest that I am ok, borderline though, but ok.

And yes, tooooo much games coming out now. I am playing too much BF3 and can see the sadnes approaching when the beta ends and to start from scratch when the retail version launches. Further, looking forward to Batman Arkham City, Skyrim, Rage, MW3 (cough...), damn, so little time.

 

[wheunis]

See my thread has been hijacked.:wtf:

Lol, no worries, any comment is welcome, a lot of users have questions pertaining to crossfire. I have a Corsair GS600 though, and calculations suggest that I am ok, borderline though, but ok.

And yes, tooooo much games coming out now. I am playing too much BF3 and can see the sadnes approaching when the beta ends and to start from scratch when the retail version launches. Further, looking forward to Batman Arkham City, Skyrim, Rage, MW3 (cough...), damn, so little time.

Borderline PSU'ing is dangerous. Trust me - you wanna upgrade that PSU.

Power fluctuations are more dangerous to electric components than any other daily risk.

 

[Fenix_ZA]

Thanks for the feedback - I will look into that.

 

[Fenix_ZA]

FEEDBACK:

I managed to obtain my second 6850 as mentioned before. The difference is amazing. I mean I ran Dirt 3 with everything maxed out with a minimum of 62FPS, I can only imagine what I've been missing out on. BF3 beta I got 80-110FPS with max available settings (think it was soft-locked to medium though) - this was on caspian border and it looked insane!!

I ran quite a few games to test the performance and compatibility and out of about 15 recent games I am experiencing issues with Crysis 2 and blops. I can understand blops as this game was released broken, but crysis 2 should at least have a fix? Still googling that one though.

One more concern is that my top card is running 15-20ºC higher that the bottom card. I'll look into a solution for that.

Otherwise, I am 100% happy with the decision and the performance increase. The scaling on these cards are awesome!!

Thanks all for the recommendations.

 

[PaPaRaZZ!]

Good thing i saw this thread. Sitting with the same idea. Friend of mine Crossfired 2 Sapphire 6850 Toxic Editions and everything looked good, however he didnt like it as he had quite a lot of microstutter and game crashes here and there which he couldnt fix.

So now I'm thinking of getting another 6950 and crossfire it, or just sell my 6950 and then upgrade to a GTX 580 ! Not sure what to do yet

 

[d3tained]

Hi

I am the friend PaPa is talking about.

Crossfire isn’t perfect and it is down to personal choice and the level off "volkakguit" you are registering at.

I experienced multiple problems and found myself spending more time googling for problems than enjoying the games.

I used to run 2 x Sapphire 6850 Toxics. Some people have no problems, other have loads. Once you have noticed micro stutter you cannot just ignore it again. But yet again this is very dependable on your “volkakguit” reading.

For someone that doesn’t care to much about disabling crossfire for some games, and that can live with a couple of crashes and troubleshooting I can recommended crossfire.

1 x Single card is in fact the easier option. Waiting for my Asus 6970 DC II. Personal preference and opinion based.

Peace out!

d3

 

[Kuga]

Hi

I am the friend PaPa is talking about.

Crossfire isn’t perfect and it is down to personal choice and the level off "volkakguit" you are registering at.

I experienced multiple problems and found myself spending more time googling for problems than enjoying the games.

I used to run 2 x Sapphire 6850 Toxics. Some people have no problems, other have loads. Once you have noticed micro stutter you cannot just ignore it again. But yet again this is very dependable on your “volkakguit” reading.

For someone that doesn’t care to much about disabling crossfire for some games, and that can live with a couple of crashes and troubleshooting I can recommended crossfire.

1 x Single card is in fact the easier option. Waiting for my Asus 6970 DC II. Personal preference and opinion based.

Peace out!

d3

I used to run 2 x 5870's. All was well. I then got a 6990, and few days ago I got a 6970.

iWin?

 

[DarthSWNT]

something fishy happened here.

KUGA, don't you want to up that ram to 16GB and double up the SSD, then do some benchmarking?
You can do scaling tests with more and more cards and with Bulldozer versus 2500K for reals. TBH i don't like most of the systems that run benchmarks... you should be running tests on components without bottlenecks in other components.

If you arent too busy and have some spare cash

 

[Kuga]

something fishy happened here.

KUGA, don't you want to up that ram to 16GB and double up the SSD, then do some benchmarking?
You can do scaling tests with more and more cards and with Bulldozer versus 2500K for reals. TBH i don't like most of the systems that run benchmarks... you should be running tests on components without bottlenecks in other components.

If you arent too busy and have some spare cash

When I have spare cash again I will. Busy paying off a loan for my vehicle =/

 

[DarthSWNT]

ATI and NVIDIA have offered mature multi-GPU support for a few years now, and they've mostly settled on a simple Alternate Frame Rendering (AFR) strategy where each video card alternates between frames to share the graphics rendering work.