A few questions regarding slot size/crossfire/etc.

[Winky_The_Winking_Turtle]

Hi,

Recently I've been thinking about upgrading my GPU from my starting budget build (7850) to a 290/290x as they're going for quite cheap at the moment.

...but before I go ahead an buy one, I've got a few questions regarding my current budget motherboard's capabilities (Gigabyte Z77 D3H).



The card I've got my eyes on atm is a MSI 290X Lightning. It's great, but it's pretty huge also, taking up "3 slots" in size. Problem is, I'm also thinking about other possible near future upgrades, and picking up a second one. Will my motherboard be able to hold two of these, or will take take up too much space (in terms of slots)?

If so, will it be a problem if these two cards are bunched together to closely, or should I look for more slimmer profiles ones?

...and just to be sure, can I even crossfire on the mobo "efficiently"? I know it has support for crossfire, but the second PCI-E runs slow (x4) than the first - does that have any significant performance decrease as a result?

Thanks

 

[pastymuncher]

Slot wise I think it would be extremely tight with the bottom card, especially as the Lightnings have backplates. You should be able to run a pair on that board but the top one is likely to run much hotter than the bottom one. I can't see that MSI would design a card with a cooler so huge that it would be impossible to crossfire with especially as most Z77/Z87/Z97 boards have similar spacing between the primary and secondary pci-e 16x slots.

There are some articles here and here that go into pci-e scaling although both are quite old and we are on pci-e 3.0 now. I feel a pair of 290x Lightnings would be wasted on a 16x/4x setup.

 

[Winky_The_Winking_Turtle]

Slot wise I think it would be extremely tight with the bottom card, especially as the Lightnings have backplates. You should be able to run a pair on that board but the top one is likely to run much hotter than the bottom one. I can't see that MSI would design a card with a cooler so huge that it would be impossible to crossfire with especially as most Z77/Z87/Z97 boards have similar spacing between the primary and secondary pci-e 16x slots.

There are some articles here and here that go into pci-e scaling although both are quite old and we are on pci-e 3.0 now. I feel a pair of 290x Lightnings would be wasted on a 16x/4x setup.

Ok thanks. It was just an idea as I'm usually against multiple GPU configurations, but I'd like to try it out some time in the future.

 

[pastymuncher]

You would need a very good psu of at least 850w too.