few TriFire questions? thanks

[Geekazoid]

I want to Trifire my 5970 with another card of the 5XXX range...

Now the 2 cards on option are 5850 and 5870...

1) Is it worth getting a 5870 with my 5970 or am I better off getting a 5850 for trifire with 5970...? What kind of performance jump is there between Trifire 5850 and 5870??? (Worth the price gap??)

2) Do I need to over clock both cards to the same clock etc?? e.g. IF I get 5870 do I need to over clock my 5970 (on both cores) to the 5870 speeds or can you just trifire cards and let them run at stock clocks/shaders/mem etc...

3) Do I need to get cards of the same brand as my 5970 is the sapphire (NON OC) edition, or can I pair any 2 company cards together?

4) I want to get 2 EK water blocks for my 5970 and my other crossfire card and just run a GPU loop can anyone spec me a decent water-cooling setup as i'm a compete noob when it comes to water-cooling (NOT water-cooling my CPU just GPU's)

thankyou

 

[marc512]

...your mad...just keep using the 5970. why do you need more power? even if you want is possible it will have a lot of driver issues.

 

[raralis]

You can CF your 5970 with both a 5850 or a 5870.

They will both work as if you have 3x 5850s. You might have some driver issues in certain games though.

Questions is, why do you need more power than a 5970? Are you running games at 2560x1600 or higher with everything maxed out?

 

[Geekazoid]

im running eyefinity setup 3 30ich monitors...

 

[raralis]

It'll depend on the games you play I guess.

Texture heavy games such as Metro2033, GTA4 will still struggle with eyefinity at that res as you get only 1gb per gpu.

You might want to consider the upcomming 5990 or CF 5870 eye6 in this case.

 

[Final8y]

im running eyefinity setup 3 30ich monitors...

Tri fire would be a minimum in that case because its a minimum for me just on a single 30"

 

[cainer]

Tri fire would be a minimum in that case because its a minimum for me just on a single 30"

ur @ TriF 3870's bit different to TriF 5850/70's

 

[Final8y]

ur @ TriF 3870's bit different to TriF 5850/70's

Its all relative to the games & hardware at the time & the benches shows that a single 5970 will not guarantee 60fps minimum fps on a single 30" let alone 3 of them.