4850 Crossfire Scaling Incredible?

Greebo · 20 Jun 2008 at 15:02

wolvers69 said:
I'd still be annoyed that I wasn't getting twice the performance some of the time. Especially having shelled out twice as much.

Nope, SLI and crossfire aren't for me unless I get twice the performance all of the time.

Oh, and what's a Sumsung 500gb?

See you point but I would look at it like this:

I bought a graphics card for £260 (albeit two) which in some games murder the GTX280 but in others runs slightly behind the GTX280 but hey, I'm happy, it cost over £140 less.

And what card can you buy for twice the money which gives you twice the performance? Answer: None.

Like all single gpu cards, as you go up in performance, the price goes up more proportionally.

A single gpu card which is 50% faster might be twice the money or more.

You just have to forget about the ones which don't work and enjoy the GTX280 beating performance in the 95% which do.

jamesy · 20 Jun 2008 at 15:06

Would my Corsair HX 520W be enough to run 2 4850's in Xfire?

1HD, 1 DvDrw, E2200 (oc'd to 3.2), 2 120mm case fans and Xigmatek HDT-S1283.

Would be nice not to have to upgrade my psu just yet.

FrankJH · 20 Jun 2008 at 15:27

jamesy said:
Would my Corsair HX 520W be enough to run 2 4850's in Xfire?

1HD, 1 DvDrw, E2200 (oc'd to 3.2), 2 120mm case fans and Xigmatek HDT-S1283.

Would be nice not to have to upgrade my psu just yet.

I think reviews are mentioning 800w psu's as a minimum....or maybe Im getting confused with the nvdia reviews lol

wolvers · 20 Jun 2008 at 15:30

Greebo said:
See you point but I would look at it like this:

I bought a graphics card for £260 (albeit two) which in some games murder the GTX280 but in others runs slightly behind the GTX280 but hey, I'm happy, it cost over £140 less.

And what card can you buy for twice the money which gives you twice the performance? Answer: None.

Like all single gpu cards, as you go up in performance, the price goes up more proportionally.

A single gpu card which is 50% faster might be twice the money or more.

You just have to forget about the ones which don't work and enjoy the GTX280 beating performance in the 95% which do.

If you carry on like that my missus is gonna be grumpy cos I'd just bought not one but two new graphics cards! :eek:

It's a fair point and Nvidia are obviously a little unnerved, and so they should be

I think I'm going to get a 4870 for the HDMI 7.1 audio, as well as the performance increase that I should get. Besides I think I would need a new mobo for proper crossfire.

On the GRID issue, haven't some people got it working by renaming the file FEAR.exe?

Greebo · 20 Jun 2008 at 15:31

FrankJH said:
I think reviews are mentioning 800w psu's as a minimum....or maybe Im getting confused with the nvdia reviews lol

Depends on the quality of your psu. 4850's are only 114W (or around that) so two will be 228W which is still less than a GTX280.

Your only running one hard drive, one optical and a dual core so your power requirements aren't that high.

jamesy · 20 Jun 2008 at 15:59

FrankJH said:
I think reviews are mentioning 800w psu's as a minimum....or maybe Im getting confused with the nvdia reviews lol

Tweak Town review has it down as 349watts under load.
Now thats on a stripped down system, with just a HD no fans or cd drives. My setup is very small in terms of power useage, but I think I may be pushing it at 520w.

jamesy · 20 Jun 2008 at 16:06

Greebo said:
Depends on the quality of your psu. 4850's are only 114W (or around that) so two will be 228W which is still less than a GTX280.

Your only running one hard drive, one optical and a dual core so your power requirements aren't that high.

Corsair HX 520W is pretty good and energy efficient, but I still think it may not be enough.
I wanted to use as little power as possible for my set up as I mainly just play games so I don't need loads of hd's etc. But now I wished I went for the 650w version after seeing what these new cards can do

msaunders · 20 Jun 2008 at 16:16

I am assuming these would work just as well in xFire mode with a 3870x2 ? Or not ?

shaffaaf27 · 20 Jun 2008 at 17:13

the HX520 is a 600W PSU in disguise

Mojo · 20 Jun 2008 at 17:40

My 520hx runs two 3870s, a Q6600 at 3.5ghz and two hard disks in RAID0. The 4850s only pull about 10-15 more watts than a 3870, so you should be ok. That said, how does the 3870 and 4850 compare at load?

Greebo · 20 Jun 2008 at 17:40

jamesy said:
Corsair HX 520W is pretty good and energy efficient, but I still think it may not be enough.
I wanted to use as little power as possible for my set up as I mainly just play games so I don't need loads of hd's etc. But now I wished I went for the 650w version after seeing what these new cards can do

Well a quad system with a 4850 uses 285W under load

http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=580&type=expert

So two cards will get you to around 400w.

Your system will use slightly less been dual core.

So you will be fine.

Deleted User 234324 · 20 Jun 2008 at 17:41

HX520 should be more than adequate for xfire 4850's, people been running xfire 2900XT's on these PSU's without problems and the 2900XT is a power hungry freak of nature.

Final8y · 20 Jun 2008 at 19:19

Greebo said:
Doesn't work in GRID and AFIK never will

Wrong!
I got it working by just renaming the exe to FEAR so it can work when they add the profile to the drivers.
Plus its always the new games that fail crossfire as they have not had time to work the drivers to the game.

Duff-Man · 20 Jun 2008 at 19:45

Final8y said:
Wrong!
I got it working by just renaming the exe to FEAR so it can work when they add the profile to the drivers.
Plus its always the new games that fail crossfire as they have not had time to work the drivers to the game.

And what performance improvements did you see, exactly?

Final8y · 20 Jun 2008 at 19:51

Duff-Man said:
And what performance improvements did you see, exactly?

Huge..i can play at 3x3780 2560x1600 2xMSAA Shadow Med, Partical low(too much smoke) Ultra everything 60fps Vsync where before it was like 0.2 fps even in the menu.

Duff-Man · 20 Jun 2008 at 20:07

Final8y said:
Huge..i can play at 3x3780 2560x1600 2xMSAA Shadow Med, Partical low(too much smoke) Ultra everything 60fps Vsync where before it was like 0.2 fps even in the menu.

Interesting.

Knock up some benchmarks, write down your procedure, and send to a few hardware review sites. This is the kind of thing which would be of interest to them.

Final8y · 20 Jun 2008 at 20:14

Duff-Man said:
Interesting.

Knock up some benchmarks, write down your procedure, and send to a few hardware review sites. This is the kind of thing which would be of interest to them.

I got the idear from another forum & it works flawlessly. I just hope that ATI sort it out at there end as i Lose Vista game draw & Xfire support by renaming.

Greebo · 20 Jun 2008 at 20:25

Final8y said:
Huge..i can play at 3x3780 2560x1600 2xMSAA Shadow Med, Partical low(too much smoke) Ultra everything 60fps Vsync where before it was like 0.2 fps even in the menu.

Well can't fault the results. Guess the maker of the game got it wrong. They say on their website because of the way the graphics are coded, xfire and SLI will never work.

Who would have thought renaming the exe is all it took?

Uriel · 20 Jun 2008 at 20:35

Just seen OCWORKBENCH 4850 crossfire reiview. Just over 100% improvement compared to a single card in Call of Juarez DX10 at high resolutions. Amazing.

Final8y · 20 Jun 2008 at 20:42

Greebo said:
Well can't fault the results. Guess the maker of the game got it wrong. They say on their website because of the way the graphics are coded, xfire and SLI will never work.

Who would have thought renaming the exe is all it took?

Yeah makes you wonder how many other games would work with a rename.
There was a thread on the subject in the games section on what rename worked best for what game.