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TWO 7850 vs ONE 7950

Drizmod

Drizmod

Drizmod

Soldato
Joined
18 Mar 2006
Posts
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Location
Birmingham, UK
I have an option to buy TWO MSI HD 7850 2gb for just over £110 each

Can anyone advise on what kind of performance to expect in comparison to a single HD 7950? Would it be similar? worse or better? Less cost effective?
 
7850 Xfire would perform better... Though it leaves you with a few problems.

Setting up Xfire can be a hastle
Heat - the Cards will run hotter, and because of this the overclocking headroom is reduced.
No Upgrade path..

I don't know which id go for..

Perofrmance = 2 x 7850
Peice of Mind = 7950

:)
 
I'd prefer a single 7950, I wouldn't like to take the risk of crossfire micro stutter (like I had when I had 2 x 6870's)
 
Thanks for the advice. I was thinking with 1 power connector on each 7850 card maybe there was less heat. Am probably wrong.
 
Advantages for dual 7850's
*Faster within every modern dedicated gaming benchmark by a good margin
*Faster within most modern games by a fair margin
*Benchmark e-peen elongation
*Redundancy should one card fail:).

Disadvantages for dual 7850's
*More heat (run hotter), especially if cards sit next to eachother leaving one without adequate airflow.
*Takes up 4 slots
*Xfired cards do not overclock as well as single cards
*Not all games show performance boosts
*Some games suffer glitches (strange textures, crashes, slowdowns, low minimun fps)
*Noisier
*Less overall video memory (2GB+2GB=2GB) may hinder higher resolutions.
*Twice as likely to fail.
*Less energy efficient.

Conclusion
Get the 7950 unless benchmarks mean everything to you.
 
Just heed the fact that many games still do not support dual GPUs at a code level.

The purist would argue that you can force them to but with very varied results.

The issue you will have (and you will) is that one 7850 is not enough to run every game out there on full settings with nice levels of FSAA or whatever you decide on. This means that when Crossfire does not work, or refuses to work properly you will have stutter issues.

You would be amazed just how many games do not support it, or, in the same token how few actually do.

Take my advice - get a 7950 and then add another later. That way when you fall back onto one GPU it can take the strain should it need to.

I run GTX 670 in SLI and even though SLI works very well these days there have been casualties.
 
Having used crossfire for a while, I would say its not worth using unless you fall into one of 2 categories:

1) you want tons of power, more than available from any one card, no choice but to use crossfire in this situation
2) you already have one card and are looking for a cheap upgrade to make things last before you do a major upgrade.
 
I had two HD 7850's in CrossFireX and in my opinion, it really isn't worth it. Ended up selling them both and getting an HD 7970 and couldn't be happier.
 
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