Need Advice regarding Crossfire build

shocco · 23 Mar 2013 at 12:38

Hey guys my brother is building a rig specifically for bitcoin mining: a GPU intensive process.

He wants to build a system with 4x 6990s! (I know crazy)

Anyway I have a few questions:

Can you build a rig with 4 6990s? The most I've seen is 2
Will there be enough space on a motherboard to support 4 6990s?
Will the computer require a water cooling setup or will a sufficient amount of fans do?
Will a standard ATX case suffice? or will I have to purchase an E-ATX case
Will a 1200W power supply suffice?

The motherboard we are thinking of purchasing is a Asus Maximus V Extreme; it states that is support 4 way crossfire.
The case we're thinking of purchasing is a Fractal R4 or Fractal XL R2
The Power Supply we would purchase is a Corsair AX1200

leightonr25 · 23 Mar 2013 at 15:54

A 6990 is basically 2x6970s in one GPU, which would mean you would have 8 6990's, which is impossible. You could have 4x6970s.

Rooster212 · 23 Mar 2013 at 21:05

Yeah as far as I know, there isn't a single motherboard that supports 8-way Crossfire. Also, the 69xx series only supports 4 way crossfire I think. 2x 6990s would be 4-way.

The way forward for lots of things like that is to research and see what kind of GPU does the job best (nVidia) then decide on a budget and move forward from there.

Rooster212 · 23 Mar 2013 at 21:18

Looking at this site here, I'd say your friend needs to get 4 7970s or something along those lines.

To do that you'll probably want a board like Asus Maximus V Extreme. This won't be a cheap setup, and running it will be no small matter.

Something like this.

YOUR BASKET
1 x Intel Core i7-3930K 3.20GHz (Sandybridge-E) Socket LGA2011 Processor - Retail £469.99
1 x EVGA SuperNova NEX 1500w Digital Classified Modular Power Supply £369.98
4 x HIS HD 7970 IceQ X² 3072MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Card (H797QM3G2M) with Crysis 3 & Bioshock PC Games £323.99 (£1,295.96)
1 x Asus Rampage IV Formula Intel X79 (Socket 2011) DDR3 Motherboard £287.99
1 x Samsung 256GB SSD 840 PRO SATA 6Gb/s Basic - (MZ-7PD256BW) £189.95
1 x Cooler Master HAF 932 Advanced Full Tower Case with USB3.0 - Black £99.98
1 x Corsair Hydro H100i High Performance Liquid CPU Cooler (Socket 1155 / 1156 / 1366 / 2011 / AM2 / AM3 / FM1 / FM2) £99.98
2 x Avexir MPower Yellow Series 16GB (2x8GB) DDR3 PC3-12800C10 1600MHz Dual Channel Memory Kit (AVD3U16001008G-2CM) £83.99 (£167.98)
Total : £2,981.81 (includes shipping : FREE).

Also, it WILL get hot between those cards, I would watercool to avoid issues.