Looking to Crossfire help advice needed

[Hairboi]

Hello, I have a z77-d3h and im looking to go down the route of Xfire.

Does the board work well with xfire?
Whats minimum psu wattage (i know this depends on gfx cards)?
Does Crossfire actually work ok, in day to day tasks

thanks

 

[mickyflinn]

Your motherboards second pci-express slot only runs at x4 so there will be a performance drop.You may want to consider a single faster gpu

 

[benjii]

I agree with mickyflinn. To answer your other two questions, the PSU really is dependent on which cards you go for. As for day to day tasks, Windows will automatically shut down the second card when not gaming (ULPS) to save power. So for desktop use, there's no difference and it works well.

 

[Hairboi]

Thanks guys!

 

[shankly1985]

Is the First and second slot PCI 3.0? if so PCI 3.0 4x = PCI 2.0 8x so it might not be an issue.

 

[MoodyB]

Posted by AMDMatt last year :

"On PCI-E2.0 x16 x4 i found the performance impact was about 5-15% depending on the game/benchmark"

http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=18499223

 

[shankly1985]

Posted by AMDMatt last year :

"On PCI-E2.0 x16 x4 i found the performance impact was about 5-15% depending on the game/benchmark"

http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=18499223

That's pci 2.0 not 3.0
His motherboard spec sheet on site don't make is clear if it's both 16x slots run pci 3.0 or just the top slot.

 

[MoodyB]

I know that So if it's pci 3.0 then it should be less of a drop.

 

[shankly1985]

I know that So if it's pci 3.0 then it should be less of a drop.

Yeah shouldn't see any performance hit pci 8x is fine.

 

[MoodyB]

His motherboard spec sheet on site don't make is clear if it's both 16x slots run pci 3.0 or just the top slot.

Yeah the manual isn't any clearer either.

Going by the XbitLabs review one slot is 3.0 & the other 2.0 :

"The Gigabyte GA-Z77-D3H doesn’t use the ability of the Intel Z77 Express to share CPU-integrated PCIe lanes between graphics slots and only offers one PCIe 3.0/2.0 x16 slot for a discrete graphics card (it always works in full-speed x16 mode). NVIDIA SLI is not supported but you can build a multi-GPU configuration by using AMD CrossFireX and the second PCIe 2.0 x16 slot (which only works in x4 mode and disables the PCIe 2.0 x1 slots)"

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/mainboards/display/gigabyte-ga-z77-d3h_2.html#sect0