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To Crossfire or not

ashmanuk67

ashmanuk67

ashmanuk67

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Joined
27 May 2007
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1,346
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Kent
I have a Asus P5k m/b first lane is 16 and the other is 8 and ATI 4870 1gig, I have posted on here before about this and some people said dont bother ?

Now i know its not ideal but it must still be better ?
I am gaming at 1920 X 1200 and cod4 and now cod5 are my main games, and since cod5 has come out my fps has droped and game just dosent feel so smooth, I know its more to do with coding of the game.

Anyone with Crossfire 4800 set ups could you please give me your thoughts.

Thanks
 
P5K second slot is 4x not 8x.

And it totally isn't worth it on that board. I tested before I got my P5E, the 2nd card is barely used, you are looking at ~10-15% boost in most stuff tops.
 
Is that because the second card is limited by the x4 speed, or some other reason.

I too have a P35 board and with low end cards running SLI getting more powerful, I'm quite tempted to upgrade to a P45 board and get a couple of 4830 cards or similar.
 
I 2nd that comment.

Used a Gigabyte P35 with dual 2900XT's and found the performance increase to be quite small. HeX's 10-15% quote seems fairly accurate.

If you really want a performance increase then sell the 4870 and buy something like the GTX 280, 4850X2 or 4870X2.

gt
 
Aye crossfire on P45 works fine due to the PCI-E 2.0, performance is nigh on identicle to the X38/X48 chipsets using the 4XXX cards.
 
Oh righto - i thought the X38/X48 boards had PCI-E 2.0 as well? Wouldn't that mean they theoretically had almost double the performance of the P45's due to twice the number of available lanes?

If not then by all means stick to a P45 idea.

gt
 
Last edited:
gt_junkie said:
Oh righto - i thought the X38/X48 boards had PCI-E 2.0 as well? Wouldn't that mean they theoretically had almost double the performance of the P45's due to twice the number of available lanes?

If not then by all means stick to a P45 idea.

gt
Click to expand...

Yeah the X38/X48 both have double the available bandwith of the P45, however current cards come nowhere near to using it, as such performance on all 3 chipsets is almost the same.

http://www.legionhardware.com/document.php?id=761

As you can see there is a slight drop in using a P45 over an X38/X48, but it isn't massive. :)
 
HeX said:
As you can see there is a slight drop in using a P45 over an X38/X48, but it isn't massive. :)
Click to expand...
That's pretty impressive. :D

Wonder how close to saturating the 8x PCI-E 2.0 they are - suppose with i7 out it doesn't really matter but those figures are very good. P45 looks a very good value board for xfiring on. :)

gt
 
Well new m/b and gfx card is to much at the momment, was hoping for a quick fix :-(

But then i should not have to add extra oomph its the game that needs tweaking :-<

Or should i buy a new m/b and wait for more cash???
 
i get aroud 170fps in cod4 at that res with max aa and af in game settings. I say get the card now, i know it will only be a small increase but will halp for now then when you have the money upgrade the mobo to get the full potential.
 
Hi Bradley8988,

It is Call of duty 5 that is the problem, I get like you very high fps in cod4 such a great game and grx card combo.

Are you playing COD 5 ???
 
^^^ thats what i thought. As Bradley said, get the card and then something like a rampage when you can afford it.
 
Well I have gone for Crossfire, great advice to both beh* and Bradley8988 thankyou.

This the fist time ever i have gone this far with a pc build for me a long slow upgrade path but then i think you do appreciate what you have more, how these people on here upgrade at a drop of a hat "WOW"

Thanks guys
 
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