Crossfire another 7970 or upgrade?

[Uncle Petey]

I added a bit to my post.

Yeah id be interested to see the difference. Also worth considering that the 7970's in question may be on air as opposed to yours on water so likely won't reach anywhere near the same clock speeds, not without getting hot and noisy anyway.

Mail me the results if you get round to it.

Yeah, water makes a bit of a difference, but I still reckon that most aircooled 7970's should be able to hit 1200 at least without getting too stroppy.

Either way, I still agree that it would be better in the long run to go for a single 290(x) with an eye on future xfire

 

[LtMatt]

Are the 290s unlocking to 2816 shaders? Because the sapphire 290x seems a bit pricey at £479

No that ship has sailed im afraid. If you want a 290X to have the best then id go for this one. However if you want to save some green queens id go with a Tri X 290. It will be about 7.5%+ slower than a 290X but you can make up that difference with a nice overclock. As you'd need a new psu for two cards, id get the best 290X you can afford and clock the nuts off it, budget permitting of course.

 

[V4NT0M]

I made the same thread yesterday:
http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=18592041

I've also been looking at a lot of benchmarks and it comes down to a choice:

290x - Better framerates than single 7970 in pretty much all games.

2x 7970 - Some games will not use the other 7970 so you will end up with no difference in some games. Other games like BF4 will get much better performance than the single 290x and other games like Crysis 3 will get more moderate gains over the 290x.

You may also have to do more fiddling with drivers and config to get it to work and even then as above frametime and microstutter issues may be apparent, or may not. But either way a lot of people advise there is more fiddling to do.

Personally I think I will be going for the 290x, the main reasons being that it's easier and more importantly I have a WF3 7970 which is pretty much terrible at overclocking as newer revisions have the core locked. Also I can get a 4GB 290x which gives a bit more futureproofing.

If you're on water cooled with a nice overclock it might be worth going for the extra 7970.

Finally:

So i'd be saving a few hundred squids over grabbing a new card

But you can sell your current card, negating much of the extra cost.

Finally again, I'll stick it in this thread rather than bumping my old one...

Someone give me their opinion, I'm currently running a 3770K at 4.4GHz with the single 7970, i'm only using a 500w PSU, everything runs perfectly fine but I feel like 500w is on the borderline, not sure that swapping to a new card (the 290x) with more wattage requirements that I'm going to overclock as much as possible is a terribly good idea. So even if I go for a single card over dual 7970s I think I might need a new PSU anyway. Plus I was kind of wanting to get a new quieter (at idle) PSU anyway...

Thanks for any thoughts.

 

[TOL247]

Dont forget if you do go for the 290x and decide to get another you will have to upgrade that PSU and could be looking at another £200 on top of the card.

 

[los]

I was thinking about this, I think I would get a 280x personally, I just really like the thought of crossfire, even though I know it can be a pain.
If not the other path I would take is sell the 7970 and get a 290 as most say the 290x isn't worth the extra.