AMD 295x2 x 2 still viable?

Watlinguk · 27 Nov 2016 at 12:13

Hi guys. Just looking at buying some parts.

How viable is 2 x 295x2 (4 cards total) for gaming please?

I'm looking at gaming at 2k, possibly 4k.

I've seen benchmarks and 1 x 295x2 often trades blows with a 1080. Can someone give me more information (performance/drivers) please. An owner of a pair of 295x2 would be great.

Thank you.

Panos · 27 Nov 2016 at 12:27

On games who support CF it will work, assuming your PSU holds.

Watlinguk · 27 Nov 2016 at 12:30

It's a corsair ax1200 . The games I want to play are world of warcraft and battlefield 1.

How is crossfire support these days please? Regards

Panos · 27 Nov 2016 at 12:40

Watlinguk said:
It's a corsair ax1200 . The games I want to play are world of warcraft and battlefield 1.

How is crossfire support these days please? Regards

I have no idea about WOW if supports CF, due to that is an ancient game.

BF1 and new games you will be fine with 4 way CF

Rroff · 27 Nov 2016 at 12:40

Unless you are getting the cards really cheap I wouldn't go down that route - quadfire support (including decent gains) is pretty hit and miss and even 2 cards in multi GPU whether SLI or CF isn't an ideal story these days with new games often lacking support for atleast a few weeks after release if at all.

I've no idea what the state of world of warcraft is these days with CF but a couple of years back it was giving no end of problems for the people I know who played wow and had CF setups (the more common being texture flickering and random black screens) and also didn't support windowed mode (no idea if its still the case) which for some was a big deal as they'd run helper programs (not cheats) alongside the game for stats, etc.

Watlinguk · 27 Nov 2016 at 12:43

I'm buying the cards at £200 each locally (that price is if I buy both at the same time). What got my attention was when I saw it trading blows with a 1080 at higher resolutions

Mayh3M · 27 Nov 2016 at 12:45

Watlinguk said:
I'm buying the cards at £200 each locally (that price is if I buy both at the same time). What got my attention was when I saw it trading blows with a 1080 at higher resolutions

Definitely not worth it.

Buy a 1070 and you will have a MUCH better experience in 90% of the games you play.

Panos · 27 Nov 2016 at 12:56

Watlinguk said:
I'm buying the cards at £200 each locally (that price is if I buy both at the same time). What got my attention was when I saw it trading blows with a 1080 at higher resolutions

Err no don't buy them, ain't worth.
Buy one and you will be ok, not both

Rroff · 27 Nov 2016 at 13:00

Panos said:
Err no don't buy them, ain't worth.
Buy one and you will be ok, not both

Yeah - you might get £200 worth out of one but you certainly aren't going to see across the board gains from GPUs 3 and 4 to make it worth another £200 on top of that. A 1070 or even 480 CF if you really want to get that level of performance via AMD would be much better use of that money.

CAT-THE-FIFTH · 27 Nov 2016 at 13:02

One at £200 might be OK if you can get reasonable scaling - a single R9 290X is still competitive with many of the sub £300 cards,but dual GPUs need to be properly supported.

Two,OTH,is probably best avoided IMHO.

nashathedog · 27 Nov 2016 at 13:07

I wouldn't touch multi cards personally, If you're willing to spend 400 pounds on gpu's get a single 1070 or get a 8gb 480 or 6gb 1060 to save a few quid. They'll all manage 2k fine and you'll have a much simpler life, I'd go for a single gpu and spend my time gaming rather than farting around with crossfire profiles and tweaks trying to fix every other game I want to play.

Watlinguk · 27 Nov 2016 at 13:20

Okay guys thanks for the input. I think I'm best either trying to get the one or sacking the idea off completely

jrwagh333 · 27 Nov 2016 at 13:30

But even getting one then you are kind of dealing with crossfire, as it's pretty much an internal crossfire on the card itself.

Watlinguk · 27 Nov 2016 at 14:01

Yeah deffinetly. Is they any thing I can check to see if there is and crossfire support/good scaling for the games I want to play please?
At least that way I wouldn't be going in blind

Dicehunter · 27 Nov 2016 at 14:34

It's an ok card but be prepared for your power bill to go up, With just 1 x 295X2 my electricity bill went up by £10 a week, Not even kidding, These things are power hungry.

Puppetmaster · 27 Nov 2016 at 16:04

Afaik crossfire does work in Warcraft, but even 1x 290X does fine @ 1440p on Ultra

pete910 · 27 Nov 2016 at 17:33

Dicehunter said:
It's an ok card but be prepared for your power bill to go up, With just 1 x 295X2 my electricity bill went up by £10 a week, Not even kidding, These things are power hungry.

Sorry dude, gona call BS on that

Dicehunter · 27 Nov 2016 at 17:41

pete910 said:
Sorry dude, gona call BS on that

Call BS on whatever you want dude, A random faceless name on a forum won't make any difference to my life

Uncle Petey · 27 Nov 2016 at 17:53

If BF1 is anything like BF4, you'll see great scaling, but you'll run out of VRAM before the cards run out of grunt at higher resolutions with maxed out settings.

I wouldn't bother tbh. Put that £400 towards a good single card or maybe a couple of used 980Ti's or something.

Rroff · 27 Nov 2016 at 18:08

Dicehunter said:
Call BS on whatever you want dude, A random faceless name on a forum won't make any difference to my life

TBH the maths is a bit hard to swallow - if you came from a ~150 watt card previously, spent atleast 7 hours a day with the GPU at high utilisation and were on a tariff at the higher end of the scale it would still only put about £10 extra on a month - you'd have to be rinsing those cards 24x7 i.e. flat out mining when not gaming and/or have a pretty sizeable overclock to push power use up to manage an extra £10 a week.

In my old flat I'd only see an extra £10 a week in the winter with an additional 3-4kw worth of heating on for several hours a day - though electricity was a bit cheaper then.