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Crossfire worth considering?

MoNkeE

MoNkeE

MoNkeE

Soldato
Joined
18 Dec 2004
Posts
9,904
Location
NE England
Hi y'all,

I've got a 2500k i5 running at 3GHz, 8GB DDR3 and an MSI twin Frozr R9 280X.

Obviously I need more RAM (I have 16GB but this becomes unreliable when all 4 sticks plugged in, not sure if mobo or ram fault), but I was wondering if it's worth picking up a second 280X for £70 and running Crossfire, as my motherboard supports it.

I don't necessarily think my 1156 socket architecture has much Upgrade opportunity, save for spending £300 on a grapahics card.

Thoughts?
 
@old gamer yeah that's my thought. The majority of major releases SHOULD support Crossfire. And I can't see any other way I can improve performance with value in mind. This rig has just been a stop gap after my ex wife poured liquid in to my PC!

@LeMson do you think that could work? It seemed fine for a while, then I noticed it was only detecting 8GB of RAM, then it started blue screening with all four sticks in. I might have a play around tonight...

Funnily enough the motherboard supports 1600MHz ram, but I can't seem to enable it within the BIOS... (mobo is an Asus P7P55D LE)
 
Having just read some views on Reddit, it seems @LoadsaMoney is right - Crossfire seems a pain to work with and has limited longevity in the market :(

First step is to get the RAM working I guess, then look at a graphics upgrade in the future.
 
Thanks for the advice guys, think I'll give it a wide berth. I've got a 3GB Twin Frozr 280X at the moment so nothing even up to the £150 point seems particularly worth upgrading to at the moment in my eyes.

I play Player Unknown's Battlegrounds and Warhammer: Total War largely; neither will work with Crossfire or even benefit from a GFX upgrade really.

Interesting my AMD drivers seem to crash a fair bit now, and even trying to uninstall the AMD software causes the PC to reboot; could this be as a result of raising the motherboards BCLK? Should I up PCI-E voltage slightly?
 
It's an Asus P7P557D LE - their website lists that as a socket 1156 motherboard.

I'm not particular au fait with overclocking these machines. The motherboard won't let me select a multiplier higher than 21, and my BCLK is set at 150, giving me a CPU speed of about 3.1GHz.
 
My chip is an i5 750 as far as I'm aware, I purchased it second hand from here. Runs at 2.66GHz at stock, got it running at just over 3.0GHz with a very mild overclocker. Will see if I can push it higher.

My ram is some Crucial RAM, DDR3 1600MHz that runs at 1.35v according to the sticker on the ram. Will this limit me?

I managed to get the other 2 sticks in the machine yesterday too, so back to 16GB.
 
If its clocked to a decent speed, will it really be so terrible? As far as I can tell the main difference between a 2500k and an i5-750 is the bus speed. The rest should be reasonably marginal?

I'm so lost with this generation of hardware!
 
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