Crossfire Confusion

The Scop

The Scop

The Scop

Associate
Joined
1 Aug 2008
Posts
194
Location
UK
hi,

Long story short with the shortage of 5850/5870 i was thinking of getting 2x 5770s in crossfire.

My 4 questions are:

1) Is this a good decision, is it worthwhile?

2) How does crossfire work, not knowing a lot about computer hardware, i wanted to know, is more confusing, does it go wrong more often?

3) Which of the cards do i plug the dvi cable into (once in the case, ready to go do i put the cable into the top one or the bottom (just using one monitor)).

4) Will either the:

Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD3R Intel X58 (Socket 1366) PCI-Express DDR3 Motherboard

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=MB-159-GI

or the

Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD5 Intel X58 (Socket 1366) PCI-Express DDR3 Motherboard [GA-EX58-UD5]

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=MB-155-GI

support crossfire

Many thanks in advance for your help and advice

The Scop
 
Yeah they both support crossfire, its nice and easy to set up, when you get the cards they have bridges supplied with them, just connect both of these between the 2 cards once installed so they can tlak to ech other, installl your drives as normal and ATI catalyst will do the rest. And yeah plug DVI cable into top card
 
I have no problems with cross fire set up exept that on the ud5 the slots are far far to close leading to the top card being 12c hotter sucking the warm air of the bottom cards memory. The 5770 in xfire seem to gve the 5850 a fair slap and will only get better with drivers to give you an idea i got. I very kind memeber gave me a 10cm xfire bridge so ill try putting it on x8/x8 and having some space to breath.

10,500 points on vantage wiith a GTX280 Pretty decent card no?

16,500 points on vatnge with 5770 and crap beta drivers :)

although vantage is by no means is the definative is a good step in comparing
 
The Scop said:
sweet, what brand would you go with? XFX, Asus, Sapphire?
Click to expand...

I think I read that some HIS cards had problems with the heatsink contact, so I'd avoid them. They're all reference cards though so you're getting the same hardware wherever you go. If I were you though I'd go with Asus as their bios supports higher clocks out of the box, assuming you want to overclock at some stage.
 
Zombie is correct the HIS had poor GPU contact so maybe stay clear. Any brand aprart from Asus can only clock to 960 core unless you flash it with an Asus bios. For that sake of it i payed the £3 more per card and got the Asus ones put them in my antec and ramped them up to 1000core/1300mem no flashing needed :):)
 
Slight thread hijack; do most games support crossfire now? I remember when SLI was in it's infancy a lot of games saw no benefit from it, is support for Crossfire/SLI pretty commonplace now?
 
1) I've done it.

2) So far so good.

3) I've got the HDMI into the 1st card

4) Im using
Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD3R Intel X58 (Socket 1366) PCI-Express DDR3 Motherboard
but they are almost touching using this board.
I've always bought 1 card (1900, 4850) intending to crossfire, but never do. Thought it was about time :)
 
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