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Have 5970 - worth adding a second card?

msaunders

msaunders

msaunders

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Joined
21 Jan 2007
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422
Location
Ireland
Hi There

I was lucky to pick up a 5970 about 5 or 6 months ago . My system is an Asus P6T SE, 6GB DDR3 @ 1333 and i7 920 @ Stock.

Thinking about adding a second GPU if I can pick one up handy and I was wondering , do I have to go for another 5970 or will xFire allow a lower spec card and if so , would that be of benefit ?

Also would my CPU then be a limiting factor at stock and would I need to OC ?

TIA
martin
 
cammy5477 said:
adding another 5970 will give you another 20% in performance as the 5th series cards dont scale that well...if anything get the 5870 for tri-fire as final8y says
Click to expand...

They can give you double at high enough res.

Game benches start here & that was on the first beta drivers that were broken on some games with Quadfire at 2560x1600 & plenty of CPU bottleneck going on, today's games would put more strain on the GPU.
You can get driver overhead issues at lower res that lead to negative scaling.
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/HIS/Radeon_HD_5970_CrossFire/3.html
 
Last edited:
I've just sold my 5970 and got 2x6970's

6000 series scale much better than the 5000 series, and it dont cost much to upgade :)
 
Just sold one of these after struggling for almost a year to run a pair, so that should tell you my answer :p.

Unfortuantely it's not as simple as saying performance will be X% better. The gains can be phenomenal, BF:BC2 scales as well as any game I've seen. More often than not though it tends to simply be broken. Also, if you have a 2gb card, as soon as you crossfire it, it will essentially be a 1gb card. This wasn't something I realised at the time, but the difference has been quite noticable since removing one of the cards, so I have to imagine it will be just as noticable for you the other way if you add a card.
 
I would have thought a 5970 would handle anything at 1920x1200, i say skip this gen keep the money towards the 7000 cards when they come out, myself would have got the 6970 crossfire but then i am stupid and wastefull with my cash
 
wedgie said:
Just sold one of these after struggling for almost a year to run a pair, so that should tell you my answer :p.

Unfortuantely it's not as simple as saying performance will be X% better. The gains can be phenomenal, BF:BC2 scales as well as any game I've seen. More often than not though it tends to simply be broken. Also, if you have a 2gb card, as soon as you crossfire it, it will essentially be a 1gb card. This wasn't something I realised at the time, but the difference has been quite noticable since removing one of the cards, so I have to imagine it will be just as noticable for you the other way if you add a card.
Click to expand...

You have got your wires crossed there. If you Xfire 2GB cards, each will still have 2GB VRAM. I think your getting confused by older 2GB dual GPU cards like the 5970 which has 2GB split between the GPUs (1GB per GPU). Or if you Xfire 2 * 1GB cards you don't get 2GB in total (as each GPU has only 1GB).

But i agree Xfire and SLi scaling is HIGHLY variable.
 
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