Crossfire worth considering?

malachi · 17 Jul 2017 at 19:08

I would give up any idea of crossfire or SLI right now. That's why I sold all my 290's. Staying single GPU now.

mikeym · 17 Jul 2017 at 19:30

What do you play MoNkeE?

I dabbled with crossfire (see signature) but have since gone single card. I mainly play sim racing games and it's honestly not worth the hassle...

Skynet5 · 17 Jul 2017 at 19:52

Sell your card to the fool that wants crossfire, or a cheap card for a second machine. Use money to upgrade.

I was mad for xfire and sli...many years much money. Not worth it anymore...vendors and Devs don't care for it anymore.

Psycho Sonny · 17 Jul 2017 at 20:09

Minstadave said:
I thought this was a worry at release that never actually amounted to anything. I happily ran 1.65V RAM with SB for years.

my RAM i'm pretty sure crapped out my motherboard. second mobo was fine but i got rid of the RAM in the end

NoobCannon · 18 Jul 2017 at 07:44

Minstadave said:
I thought and did similar (7990 - essentially two 7970s) and it was terrible, wish I had never bothered - poor support, stutter, flickering textures. Moving to a 980Ti was the best move I ever did.

Ah the amd flicker fest. I remember that was the final nail in the coffin for amd and Me!

Changed 980ti sli and night and day difference

maonayze · 18 Jul 2017 at 09:07

Yeah, the days of SLI and Crossfire seem to be over. It's not the fault of the hardware coz as we are all aware....it used to work very well indeed. It's down to lack of support in drivers and most of all with the gaming Dev support that is shocking these days. Both methods are really not worth the outlay right now...its not solely crossfire as SLI is just as badly supported. To be honest unless you were getting 70% scalability and above in most games it wasnt worth it for price/performance anyway.

MoNkeE · 18 Jul 2017 at 10:15

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?

Badfish · 18 Jul 2017 at 10:33

I've only ever had bad experiences with crossfire, lots of problems and generally not very good performance. If you are short on money but need an upgrade then go for a second hand 970, 980 or 980TI, they will all perform well and should be hassle free assuming the hardware is still good.

DONOHUE07 · 18 Jul 2017 at 10:42

Just to add what's already been mentioned, Crossfire and multi GPU isn't worth it. 4 years ago it was brilliant, it just worked out of the box on pretty much every game I played with my 6950's, now, it's a completely different story.

pandem0nium · 18 Jul 2017 at 11:21

MoNkeE said:
Hi y'all,

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

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

Thoughts?

That's socket 1155. Best cpu you could get to upgrade is a 3770k for a good boost. Or at least get the I5 overclocked past 4ghz.

NoobCannon · 18 Jul 2017 at 11:42

MoNkeE said:
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?

Total warhammer works in sli but is heavily cpu limited so not worth it just for that. No idea on pubg, 3rd person games arent my thing

MoNkeE · 18 Jul 2017 at 11:44

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.

pandem0nium · 18 Jul 2017 at 13:20

Then it can't be a 2500K. Yeah, not a lot you can do about that old platform.

BS Dave · 18 Jul 2017 at 13:41

MoNkeE said:
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.

Your chip can almost certainly do 4Ghz. I had one and it did just that with very reasonable volts. All the RAM for that platform was 1.65 volts as well so don't bother changing that either.

Your chip is a Lynnfield chip. learn how to overclock it here.

http://www.masterslair.com/how-to-overclock-intel-core-i7-i5-i3-cpu-overclocking-guide/

The i7 860 was the next chip up which had hyperthreading. Nexus 18 has the same chip IIRC.

This should help with minimums, and to smooth things out. Don't go crossfire.

D

andy_mk3 · 18 Jul 2017 at 13:43

I ran a pair of MSI 280x's in crossfire for a couple of years and never had any problems. I upgraded to a 1080 and was blown away though!

X3T · 18 Jul 2017 at 13:49

I've used both SLI and Crossfire in the past, and currently have 2x Fury X crossfired. I must be one of the few lucky ones as I have never had any issues at all. Frame rates are high and game play is smooth!

MoNkeE · 18 Jul 2017 at 13:58

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.

Terrorfirmer · 18 Jul 2017 at 14:08

Your CPU is a pretty massive bottleneck, a 2500K is one thing but the i5-750 is really past it at this point in the latest games.

You could get a cheap 2nd hand i7-870 and overclock that (here they sell for about €40 2nd hand) - that would help in a lot of games that use more threads, though some are still very dependent on strong single core performance (not sure bout battlegrounds)

MoNkeE · 18 Jul 2017 at 15:12

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!

Rroff · 18 Jul 2017 at 15:27

DONOHUE07 said:
Just to add what's already been mentioned, Crossfire and multi GPU isn't worth it. 4 years ago it was brilliant, it just worked out of the box on pretty much every game I played with my 6950's, now, it's a completely different story.

When I had my GTX470 SLI setup it generally worked very well - but the writing was already on the wall towards the end of their life and I didn't bother with the 780 going SLI. At that time someone I knew IRL had a 6000 series crossfire setup and it wasn't as smooth a story - I mean mostly it worked but not uncommon to run into issues like flickering textures which sometimes would only be fixed in drivers 3-4 months after a game release, etc. and some weird random issues with the mouse cursor icon.