P35-DS4 Crossfire Question

[zero-one]

Hiya

A friend has got the Gigabyte GA-P35-DS4 mobo. He also has a HD3870. I've got a HD3850 that i don't need. My question is, would he be able to Crossfire the two on that motherboard?

I know on the new AMD boards you can essentially add the power of the lesser card without lowering the power of the bigger card if you get what i mean. Can this be done on a P35 mobo?

Cheers

George

 

[LoadsaMoney]

Yes he'd be able to pair your 3850 with his 3870 fine (one of the + points of CrossfireX that, being able to mix and match), just bear in mind that the 2nd slot only runs at 4x on those boards, so he may not get much of a performance boost, but seen as it can be paired fine with it as said, then theres no harm in trying it to find out.

 

[zero-one]

Cheers mate. Might be making a bit of cash now!

 

[carrot1401]

Do the cards run at their seperate speeds, or will the 3870 be dragged down to 3850 speeds??

 

[zero-one]

My friend would like to know the answer to this one too if possible.

Thanks

 

[HummuH1]

I've tried this and its fine it you've got a second card lying around doing nothing but certainly not worth buying a second card sepcifically for this. Just not enough in it IMO. Really need 2 x16 for results.

 

[LoadsaMoney]

Do the cards run at their seperate speeds,

Yes.

 

[carrot1401]

Excellent, cheers for that...

 

[WJA96]

The whole 4x/16x vs. 16x/16x thing is somewhat exaggerated. There is something like a 10-20% drop in performance between the two configurations, so it will probably give about a 50% boost to the existing performance. If you had an X38 or x48 board then you could expect a 60-70% boost in performance. Crossfire scales MUCH better than SLi, although you almost never see anything approaching a true doubling of the speed.