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5850 in crossfire

Merlin5

Merlin5

Merlin5

Soldato
Joined
17 Aug 2009
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Finchley, London
If I wanted to get performance 'similar' to a 7970, I believe a second 5850 in CF would do it? I would be upgrading my motherboard to do CF. Instead of me spending over £300 for a 7970, which I couldn't afford since I want to upgrade the rest of my system, I could probably pick up a used 5850 for £75 to £80. Easily the cheapest solution for my needs.

But, what's the deal with CF, is it going to give me trouble, lots of heat, and would my 650w PSU (in sig) handle it? Also, since my 5850 uses a pair of 6-pin PCI-E from the PSU, how would I connect a second pair of 6-pin PCI-E cables for the second card? Do I need splitters connected to each existing 6 pin pci-e to create four x 6 pin PCI-E connectors? Or do I need PCI-E graphics molex to 6 pin power cables to connect to available molex's ?
 
I don't think that PSU will be up to the task and also, your CPU unless heavily overclocked will create a bottleneck with 2x5850.

Edit:

After further investigation, I found that the 5850 uses 188w max power so to put myself wrong, that PSU should be ok.
 
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2x5850's won't give you 7970 performance tbh.

I have 2 now and although they are great cards I was comparing lots of benchmarks and generally the 5850's hit just under 7950 performance. ( remember the 1gb of ram hinders games with large textures)

I'm looking to upgrade to a single 7950 or similar once the 690 and 670 are announced to see how well the 670 performs and at what price. Then wait for the subsequent price drops :)
 
gregster said:
I don't think that PSU will be up to the task and also, your CPU unless heavily overclocked will create a bottleneck with 2x5850.

Edit:

After further investigation, I found that the 5850 uses 188w max power so to put myself wrong, that PSU should be ok.
Click to expand...

That's the 5870, 5850 is rated to 151 W (overclocks may increase this).

SLI 5850's will be in the range of a GTX 580 (sometimes faster, sometimes slower), with a 1GB VRAM limit.

A HD 7950 at stock would expect to beat it in all realworld benchmarks, then add it's good overclocking ability.

Still Crossfire is the cheaper option by far.
 
I am on my phone at work (stupid nights) so I couldn't see the Anandtech comparisons easy. I am glad you did the research :) a deffo cheap upgrade though.
 
I used to have a 5850 Xfire setup, It was very capable but I think the 1GB VRAM let it down, especially in BF3. The 7950 I have now just feels much smoother with none of the xfire issues.
If you can upgrade your system with a second one for a reasonably low cost it is deffinatly worth it though.
 
You should consider VRAM unfortunately too. You're going to have significant GPU power but on some games you'll be on the limit/capped by how much VRAM you have.
 
Well even if it's a way below a single 7970 performance, my main goal here is to have enough grunt to run 3D games, as well as generally having more framerate for 2D games, compared to my single 5850 and puny AMD 550BE. 5850CF along with new i5 Ivybridge should achieve that goal, shouldn't it? I was actually considering the Club 3D 6950 but I read that 5850CF beats a single 6950 quite a bit, and anandtech comparison seems to verify that.
 
For benchmarking comparisons I always thought of 5850xfire to being pretty much on par with a 5970 +/- a few percent.
 
GPU power - yes. It's just hard to recommend a 1GB dual GPU set up. You're likely to be in a position for certain games where you have enough GPU power to run max settings but not enough memory. That'd be extremely frustrating to me.

1GB is ok for a lot of games but it's still close to being at the limit.
 
Thing is, there's not many affordable options for GFX upgrading. :(

Other than crossfire, 6950 isn't going to be that much better than my 5850, and 7XXX series card are stupidly expensive.
 
5850 in CF will be nice for BF3 but as pointed out, VRAM will be an issue. All this means is though that instead of ultra, play on high and you will get great fps returns.
 
Sasahara said:
SLI 5850's will be in the range of a GTX 580 (sometimes faster, sometimes slower), with a 1GB VRAM limit.
Click to expand...
Sasahara said:
Still Crossfire is the cheaper option by far.
Click to expand...

Merlin5 said:
6950 isn't going to be that much better than my 5850
Click to expand...

Yes it is, there's more to it than looking at max fps v max fps comparisons, the 6950 will give you considerably better avg's and mins than the 5850, in turn giving you smoother game play all round including better tessellation.

Sell your 5850, there is a 6950 IceQ X PLUS 2GB for sale in the members market, oc it and it's not far off the 580 with more vram and no MB change, could be cheaper than going CrossFire with the benefit of the single card having no loss of performance on the lesser scaling titles.
 
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Due to the price reductions of the 6900's, buy one for now, then add another further down the line. Selling your 5850 will help offset the cost of one of them.
 
Yeah, just settle for lower setting, until you can afford a better card setup.

Good thing about the 5850, if you pay the going rate for one now, it's so low in 6 months or even a years time there's only so much value it can lose. I'd estimate in 6 months time each card won't have lost more than £20 in value.
 
tommybhoy said:
Yes it is, there's more to it than looking at max fps v max fps comparisons, the 6950 will give you considerably better avg's and mins than the 5850, in turn giving you smoother game play all round including better tessellation.

Sell your 5850, there is a 6950 IceQ X PLUS 2GB for sale in the members market, oc it and it's not far off the 580 with more vram and no MB change, could be cheaper than going CrossFire with the benefit of the single card having no loss of performance on the lesser scaling titles.
Click to expand...

+1 probably the best alternative. :)
 
tommybhoy said:
Sell your 5850, there is a 6950 IceQ X PLUS 2GB for sale in the members market, oc it and it's not far off the 580 with more vram and no MB change, could be cheaper than going CrossFire with the benefit of the single card having no loss of performance on the lesser scaling titles.
Click to expand...

Sounds good, I'll take a look. So that 6950 IceQ X PLUS 2GB would be roughly equivalent to 5850CF? I don't mind paying more for a graphics card, but the tradeoff is going to my Plan B.

Plan A was buying ivybridge/new mobo/new ram/ 2nd 5850.

Plan B is just to change my CPU to fit my current motherboard, a new Phenom X4 965BE and overclock it. And a new GPU card.

I wonder if the 6950 IceQ X PLUS 2GB/ Phenom X4 965BE combo would give similar gaming results as my plan A.
 
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