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Buying a second HD4870

cobrax

cobrax

cobrax

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Joined
23 Mar 2004
Posts
238
Just a really quick question before i do some impulse buying, would it be a sensable idea to buy a second HD4870 1Gb to go with one i already have, as the Gainward one is on the cheap right now. What ive already got is a Powercolor HD4870 1Gb, http://www.powercolor.com/global/products_features.asp?id=84
and the motherboard is the DFI DK P45-T2RS.

Never done crossfire or SLI before so i was unsure wether the fact that the motherboard will only be useing 8-lanes per card. Is this going to be much of a isue?
 
8 lanes per card is fine for crossfire, the difference between 8x/8x and 16x/16x is pretty much negligible. Also buy the Gainward one, only slightly more than 2nd hand prices and comes with 3 months warranty.
 
or you could sell your current 4870, add what you get for that to the cost of buying a 2nd one, and for a little bit more you could get a 460, just another option to consider
 
I belive that the current card may have a problem with one of the DVi outputs not working, so dont whant to Ebay it as a possible faulty card.
 
just out of interest, how powerful is your power supply? Just want to be sure it'll be up to the task of powering the whole system. Also, what's the rest of your spec? :)
 
Full spec is:-

DFI DK P45-T2RS
Intel E8400 @ 4GHz
4Gb of ram (OCZ)
700Watt OCZ PSU
Powercolor 4870 1Gb
And 4 x HDD

All this only draws about 400 Watts from the wall, i got one of those power monitors, so im guessing there is still some headroom of power left.
 
I think 2 cores are good for now, hopping to be doing a bigger upgread next year, with new motherboard and CPU at the same time. Im going to buy the card, if i dont see any advantage, i could always Ebay it. :)
 
they was great in thier time ( still are today)

i was on HD4870 xfire once till one died
 
Ah, bandwagon <- hop on.

I've a 4870 512Mb at the mo, what would I have to spend to better a crossfire 4870 setup? I game at 1680x1050 (occasionally 1920x1080 on bachelors weekends :) ) and it seems I can get another 4870 for only £70ish.
 
Bossk128 said:
Ah, bandwagon <- hop on.

I've a 4870 512Mb at the mo, what would I have to spend to better a crossfire 4870 setup? I game at 1680x1050 (occasionally 1920x1080 on bachelors weekends :) ) and it seems I can get another 4870 for only £70ish.
Click to expand...
Not worth crossfiring on 512MB cards. If you want to upgrade, take this chance to move away from 512MB card...sell it, and upgrade to something like GTX460 1GB or 5850 1GB, or even GTX470.
 
Nothing wrong with the 512 cards. As far as I know there isn't a great deal of performance difference at 1680x1050, however at very high resolutions it does make a difference.
 
That's what I though would be a prob, 512Mb. Is there a low footprint monitoring prog I can use to watch VRAM load whilst gaming on my GPU? I'm running XP for games.
 
neo-omega said:
Nothing wrong with the 512 cards. As far as I know there isn't a great deal of performance difference at 1680x1050, however at very high resolutions it does make a difference.
Click to expand...
Although he says he game at 1680x1050, he also mention he does game at 1920x1080 as well, so not such a good idea going CF on the 512MB cards. If he does upgrade, I would imagine he will game at 1920x1080 more often...otherwise the 4870 512MB alone would be more than capable for maxing out most games (less the one or two extremely demanding ones) at 1680x1050 anyway.
 
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