Crossfire or not?

[Bumsbry]

About to build a new pc, it will be doing mainly video editing but I do play some games like SC2.

Think im going with this bundle (or buying similar components seperately and trying to overclock myself)
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=BU-011-OP&groupid=43&catid=339&subcat=

I have an old ATI Radeon HD 3870 that does me fine for graphics at the moment. I have always wondered about the crossfire thing, few seem to do it, even the high end gamers seem to just go for a single high end card. So I have 3 options,

1: save money and use my old card,
2: buy a 2nd identical card and have 2(hard to find but roughly £70, it would be great to find second hand),
3: buy a totally new card and try out this CUDA thing with CS5

thoughts?

 

[Skyrocket]

3870 in crossfire is big fail.
just get a 5770 £111 much quicker

or a 460 £120 768mb

 

[jms198]

A 3870x2 (about the same as 3870s in Xfire) provides about the same power as a lot of what would be considered low ened gaming cards now. The 5750 would be a good option with about the same power from amd. Have a look here at Toms for a full list (its outdated but there is a newer one somewhere).

£70 for a 3870 is far too much imo.

 

[Vince]

sold a 3870 6 months ago for £25... Thats the kind of price you should be paying. I also ran 3870 in crossfire for a while and found them great offering decent performance for the time.

Today however, as others have said you can get a better card at a cheaper price. a pair of 3870's sits somewhere between a 4850 and a 4870 in terms of performance (closer to the 4870 where scaling is good), therefore any gpu above and including the 5770 (ati's range) and gts450 (nv's range) are going to offer a decent performance gain at a resonable price.