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Crossfire or Not?

Anatonic

Anatonic

Anatonic

Associate
Joined
5 Sep 2011
Posts
27
OK guys so I'm upgrading my rig to a new SandyBridge system (i5 2500k) and along with al the bells and whistles on that I'm stuck with what to do GFX card wise...

At the moment I have an XFX Radeon HD 5770 (1GB) and it does support DX11. My two options are:

1) Keep the existing card and pick up a second XFX Radeon HD 5770 for around £60 - £80 off eBay and Crossfire them in my new build

2) Ditch the 5770 and upgrade to a Sapphire Toxic Radeon 6950 (potentially unlocking 6970 BIOS).

Obviously option one will save quite a bit of money - but realistically is it going to give me similar performance in the upcoming games we have on the way (BF3 etc.). I've limited expereince of Crossfire and whether it's worth it or not.

I'm sure it'll be advantageous for my potential Eyefinity setup when I come to adding an additional two monitors for sim racing. As I guess two GPUs will handle the higher / extended resolutions better? Also my PSU is 650W and I'm unsure if it'll handle two 5770s? It's a decent model Antec supply in my Antec 900 case (v1).

Any thoughts?
 
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With BF3 on it's way I would go for the 6950 to give space for future upgrades, also if you plan on going Eyefinity the 6950 2gig will handle the higher resolutions. I've gone crossfire this week and my experience so far has been really good.
 
Would there be an issue with having two of the 5770 cards running 8x/8x as they seem to in Crossfire? Especially if compared with a newer, single graphics card running at 16x on the lane?

I'm just weighing up whether I'll see a massive difference in spending more money or if I should just spend £50 for another GFX card, crossfire them, then upgrade when things are getting tough? (and when the newer cards are out as I'm sure the 7000 series wont be far off?)
 
Even for 580 SLI, the performance difference between x8+x8 and x16+x16 is around 2%.

However, 5770 x 2 is delivering about the same performance as a single 5870 or a single 6950. This is not capable of maxing out BFBC2 under 1920x1200 if you are a hardcore player who requires 60 fps stable.
 
Harmony - cheers for that fella - I think I'll look at going down the 6950/6970 route and XFire those going forwards... the single 2GB VRAM for the GPU should tackle everything I want for now including Eyefinity on sim racers next year.

May as well buy into new tech if I'm upgrading the rest - rather than making do with something I'll need to replace sooner rather than later...
 
The only thing with X fire is there can be big driver issues but these days thats few and far between. If you were to get a 6950 at the moment then you could always sell it and get a & series card when they come out and there is meant to be around a 25 % performance increase according to people on these forums :)
 
In general I'd avoid xfire/sli you will regret it the moment you go to play the latest game and you have to wait for xfire/sli fixes it can be a real pain.The only cards it makes sense to double up on at the moment are 2x gtx 460 1gbhttp://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/314?vs=292 or 2x 5850 / 6850 but this relies upon getting them for around £80-£90 each or you may as well just buy a single card new or second hand that's as fast with slight overclock.

It's a viscous cycle as by the time you can xfire/sli or worth doing it, you are better off selling single card and buying another single instead of buying the same for dual card setup if that makes sense only worth doing if the price is right but it's rare.

Like xfire 5770 is about as fast as a 5870 but then a second hand 5870 can be had for £120 by now probably or a 5850 £85 can be overclocked easy to get the same performance as can the 6850 etc and so on.

Only time I see a dual card setup being a good idea is say you had a 5770 now and they were going for peanuts second hand but they still go for £55-£65.I paid £85 for my 5770 second hand early 2010 and have never seen such a small depreciation in a graphics cards resale value.

Of course I shall be selling the 5770 soon and buying a faster single card probably a second hand 5850/5870/6870 depending on how they do in bf3 @1680-1050 if it can almost max it small aa af etc and get solid 60fps that's good enough for me.

2x 6850 xfire seems a sweetspot with the lowest power draw I think 2x 5850 exact same performance power draw as well.
 
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I have a single 5850 card in my machine running at stock with the 10.3 drivers still :) and i run BF2 on high settings during the main game and multiplayer and dont have any issues at all. I think the 5850 is a fab card it overclocks with ease on stock volts to around 810/1100 never goes above 50c during gameplay with my msi fan profile (45% for 50c) and with a bit of voltage tweak you can get 900+ on the core. I know the card may be a bit dated now but as long as games like GTA Metro Crysis run ok on it i wont be changing anytime soon.
 
Crossfire is a much more streamlined setup than it used to be (I'm using a Xfire setup atm), but in this case I'd say go for the single card.

It'll offer more consistant performance, and no worries of any of the microstutter related issues (which basically makes your framerate seem slightly lower than it is at lower framerates).
Plus potentially you could crossfire a 6950 in the future.
 
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