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BF4 Crossfire 7850 or new card?

Richeh

Richeh

Richeh

Soldato
Joined
24 Jul 2003
Posts
3,395
Location
South East Coast
My current spec is:

Intel 3570k
Gigabyte Z77-D3H
8GB Geil Ram
SSD
4x SATA HDD
HIS 7850 2GB
Coolermaster Silent Pro 600W PSU

The only game I really play is Battlefield 3 which runs well enough on full details but I can't enable MSAA due to the frame hit.

This wasn't a problem as I used to play on a 40" LCD from about 6-7 feet away. New TV later and its 46" from 6 foot away and godamn I can see those jaggies!

With the imminent release of BF4 I figured if I wanted max details I would probably need to upgrade. I did have a look at the HIS 7850's a few weeks ago but they were (and still are) £150+. Now I have seen that the MSI 7850 is £120. My motherboard is only 16x/4x but doing some general research on here i'm looking at a maximum of 5-10% slower than full PCI-E speed.

Basically, what is my best option?

Crossfire my 7850 or go for a new single card which I guess I will have to spend about £250-300 to get close/above Xfire 7850 speeds?

Also would my PSU be ok? I know the 7850's are much lower powered that than their bigger brothers but if I have to factor a new PSU in i'd likely go for a single card.

Cheers for any help.
 
Adding on a 7850 is easiest, but I don't like Crossfire on midrange cards. If you sold the 7850 and got a 7950 you wouldn't get as much performance, but you could always add on another 7950 later, and you'd be more future proof with higher memory bandwidth and capacity. Also I've got a feeling that BF4 will want 3GB for decent performance at max settings.
 
xfire and yeah your psu will be ok

could put the extra and buy a single msi 7970 but tbh the xfire should match/maybe beat a single 7970
 
For the BF3 thing, I'd suggest a combination of low/med/high settings which should let you get away with at least 2xMSAA.
It'll still look a hell of a lot better than it does on console :)
 
A 7950 isn't double, but at ~1100MHz it's getting near:

Battlefield 3
1920 x 1080 [4xAA/16xAF] 37.5 67.3 (+79,2%)
 
Richeh said:
My current spec is:

Intel 3570k
Gigabyte Z77-D3H
8GB Geil Ram
SSD
4x SATA HDD
HIS 7850 2GB
Coolermaster Silent Pro 600W PSU

The only game I really play is Battlefield 3 which runs well enough on full details but I can't enable MSAA due to the frame hit.

This wasn't a problem as I used to play on a 40" LCD from about 6-7 feet away. New TV later and its 46" from 6 foot away and godamn I can see those jaggies!

With the imminent release of BF4 I figured if I wanted max details I would probably need to upgrade. I did have a look at the HIS 7850's a few weeks ago but they were (and still are) £150+. Now I have seen that the MSI 7850 is £120. My motherboard is only 16x/4x but doing some general research on here i'm looking at a maximum of 5-10% slower than full PCI-E speed.

Basically, what is my best option?

Crossfire my 7850 or go for a new single card which I guess I will have to spend about £250-300 to get close/above Xfire 7850 speeds?

Also would my PSU be ok? I know the 7850's are much lower powered that than their bigger brothers but if I have to factor a new PSU in i'd likely go for a single card.

Cheers for any help.
Click to expand...

If it was me i'd go for a 7950 now with a view to adding another at a later date if required. This will give you more vram and gpu grunt to play with should you add another 7950 further down the line. You will lose about 5-10% performance on x16 x4 setup. I'd still suggest going for the x8 x8 setup if you can afford the mobo upgrade though.
 
LtMatt said:
If it was me i'd go for a 7950 now with a view to adding another at a later date if required. This will give you more vram and gpu grunt to play with should you add another 7950 further down the line. You will lose about 5-10% performance on x16 x4 setup. I'd still suggest going for the x8 x8 setup if you can afford the mobo upgrade though.
Click to expand...

If it's PCI-E 3.0 he won't be losing anything.
 
Martini1991 said:
I thought it only dropped to to 8x due to the amount of lanes available on the PCI-E controller, so it shouldn't logically drop to 4x.
Click to expand...

I've read in forums before that they have to run at the same speed, but that may not be true. I'd imagine it'd have to run at 8x4x though, as 16x4x is higher bandwidth than 8x8x (and boards that do three cards are 8x4x4x).
 
I was under the impression that amd gpus performed poorly in crossfire in bf3 plus I always thought it was better to get one better card than getting 2 ok cards unless you have a multi monitor setup
 
single 7970 £189 sell the games and your old card EDIT: scrap the 7970 the offer isn't on or I can't find it:(

or add in another 7850 for £120

less heat issues with a single card

both should handle bf3/4
 
Martini1991 said:
Literally never heard that they have to run at the same speed ever :p
Even 8x/4x at PCI-E 3.0 is fine, it's the same as 16x 8x PCI-E 2.0.
Click to expand...

Could be total rubbish, I've never seen anything on a proper site about it.

If there's no problem running them at different speeds, then it'd make no sense to replace the board for 8x/8x.
 
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