6990 Crossfire

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15 May 2008
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145
Hi guys, I already have a 6990 and I am just weighing up whether to get another one and crossfire it in the future.

This is my current Motherboard and it looks like the 2nd 6990 will be so close to the first it will block the air intake?

Is that normal for crossfire, never done it? has anyone else used two 6990's on this MB?


Thanks guys :)

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i got the same board in mine right now and i can tell you crossfire would be fine, i had 2 5870's in CF and only issue was the 1st card ran hotter by about 10*C due to lack of air intake, but tbh in the 5870's the hot air was going out of the sides of the card and the fans are acting as an intake so it wouldnt be a problem for you
 
The HD 6990 is already a very hot running card, approximately 85°C in normal mode and 87°C unlocked.

Using 2 in the blue slots on that motherboard I wouldn't like to think what the temperature of the top card would get to with the air flow blocked to it.

You could possibly use the top blue slot and the orange slot with a long Crossfire bridge but the orange slot is only x8 speed which might bottleneck a twin GPU card.

Also remember that Quadfire can be very hit and miss. Sometimes is scales very well and sometimes it's very poor.

Your Antec 1000W PSU is probably only just good enough for Crossfired HD 6990's especially in unlocked mode. Does it have four 8 pin PCI-E power connectors?

You probably also need to overclock your CPU to around 4GHz to try and avoid bottlenecking the cards.
 
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I'd buy a new board and cpu for £500 instead of another GPU.

Nothing wrong with your current but its going to be boiling in there.
 
Your Antec 1000W PSU is probably only just good enough for Crossfired HD 6990's especially in unlocked mode. Does it have four 8 pin PCI-E power connectors?

You probably also need to overclock your CPU to around 4GHz to try and avoid bottlenecking the cards.

Good point, I think I only have two 8 pin connectors.

Reference the overclocking of the CPU.

I have it overclocked to 3.4GHz at the moment. Does anyone have some reference settings for my board and CPU I could try without the risk of destroying my CPU :D

I'd buy a new board and cpu for £500 instead of another GPU.

Nothing wrong with your current but its going to be boiling in there.

I'm all for that. Is there a particular motherboard and CPU you could reccommend that would give me a fairly good improvement in performance?


Do you need the power ? or you just got the upgrade bug ? and you just fancy it ?

Get a 2500k. :D And clock its head off.

TBH, my machine is plenty powerful enough to do everything I want of it untill we come to the soon to be released BF3.

I have been playing the Beta which I understand is set to the high graphical settings by default (not sure about this at all).

With my current set up I am getting around 60 FPS to 80 FPS depending on where I am and what I am doing.

I would be happy with this but if the Beta is hard wired to High settings and not Ultra as I intend / would like to play it, I may be in trouble :D

This is purely me preparing for the worst and weighing up my options.

The BF3 Beta is an old build and the final release will no doubt be far better optimised and I will be fine but if not, I will be doing whatever it takes to achieve my goal, i.e. play the game smoothly on Ultra :cool:
 
The crossfire scaling so far appears to only scale well up to 3 GPUs, so personally I would be looking into a tri-fire with the addition of a 6970.
 
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