-
Competitor rules
Please remember that any mention of competitors, hinting at competitors or offering to provide details of competitors will result in an account suspension. The full rules can be found under the 'Terms and Rules' link in the bottom right corner of your screen. Just don't mention competitors in any way, shape or form and you'll be OK.
CrossfireX
- Thread starter straxusii
- Start date
Associate
- Joined
- 25 Feb 2008
- Posts
- 944
crossfire X can run on P35 boards... but the x4 slot will slow things down...
Crossfiring 2 different cards i.e. 3870 with 3850 is far far from ideal unless you can get the slower card to run the same performance as the faster card - or clock the faster card down - otherwise in any serious gaming you will find that its noticeably "lumpy" for want of a better way to describe it - or you can get it smooth but at a bigger expense in performance.
You _can_ do this with SLI btw but I don't reccomend it.
You _can_ do this with SLI btw but I don't reccomend it.
Hmmm I thought my board had 2 PCIE x16 slots...I may be wrong.
Edit:
http://www.giga-byte.com/Products/Motherboard/Products_Overview.aspx?ProductID=2639
Seems it does? Or am I possibly missing something
yeah my board says the same (dual pci ex x16 slots but dont think they are both x16 http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=MB-089-MS&groupid=701&catid=5&subcat=913
For me Crossfire x is the best solution because of the multimonitor support. I can't believe Sli can't run 2 displays at the same time
Indeed, it is the single reason why I returned my 2nd 8800GT.
Caporegime
- Joined
- 8 Jul 2003
- Posts
- 30,063
- Location
- In a house
Yeah on P965/P35 chipset boards, the 2nd slot runs at 4x when using 2x cards in Crossfire.
so, if you had say a 3870 with a 3850 the clocks would have to be the same wouldn't they? so that means you either have to overclock the 3850 to match the 3870 or underclock the 3870. and how would one card having gddr4 and the other having gddr3 affect it?
Clocks don't have to be the same but the faster card will have to wait on the slower card.
No, this is not true. Unlike SLI; with crossfire the faster card simply gets a larger amount of work to do. So mixing different performing cards will not have any real negative effect on either card, but will improve overall performance.
No this is not true, the faster card simply does a larger share of the work.
(Crossfire is different to SLI in this regard.)
Fraid that ain't entirely true...
Problem is... theres only 2 real ways to do multi-GPU rendering... one splits each frame up between the different cards and the other farms out each frame as it comes to the next available card...
CrossfireX will always use the 2nd method aka AFR this means that if the slower card comes up next and takes too long rendering a frame it will end up being "thrown away" to keep things smooth - so while overall you will see a performance gain due to the top end being pushed up a bit - in the situations where you really need it when things are really bogging down your going to lose all the advantages of one of the cards.
Also if you have 2 or more cards with different speed/size memory the faster cards will run at the speed of the memory of the slowest card.
Lastly it can have a negative effect as while your max fps might be way way up and drag up your average in the process - your minimum fps again what you really want as high as possible can drop by 25-30% in quite a few games.
Last edited:
The memory nor the cpu get down clocked to the slowest card.
The memory size gets reduced to the lowest card & its best to think of the mix & match as having VSync on between the cards.
nVidia supporting ATI technology on their mobos.... not likely.
I think people will agree with me that the nForce chipsets are what hold back SLi anyway... nVidia, please, stick to graphics, let Intel deal with the chipets!