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Worth going CrossFire?

DarkTheSupreme

DarkTheSupreme

DarkTheSupreme

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Joined
17 Aug 2012
Posts
130
Location
Belfast, Northern Ireland
So currently I have a Gigabyte 7970 Windforce, which is a great card and I was thinking about getting another to stay over 120fps for my new 120hz monitor.

But the only problem is my motherboards (Gigabyte Z77-D3H) second PCI-E slot only runs at x4. What kind of performance loss would I be looking at?
 
Shouldn't be a massive performance drop.. it'd be like running a 7970 at pci-e 2.0 8x.

You don't really need 7970 crossfire at 1080p though. When I was 1080 I couldn't tell the difference between 680 and 680 SLI
 
Alright, thanks for the info.

A single 7970 was more than enough at 60hz, but since i've got used to the smoothness of 120, it's really been bugging me when it drops down to 80/90 in some maps in BF3, and that's with lower settings. I'd like to be able to put a few settings back up and play with AA again.
 
I can't tell the difference between 60fps and 120fps when running 120hz tbh. Smooth fluid motion either way.

I can definitely tell the difference between 60hz and 120hz though. The strength of the panel is in the pixel response time.

I still get drops to 80 fps at times in bf3 so I suspect crossfire won't fix that (hence me saying I couldn't tell the difference between 680 and 680 SLI).
 
Even running @4x 2.0 the difference in performance isn't anything to worry about, not ideal...but shouldn't be terrible.

Just turn your settings down? I personally cannot recommend CF7970s, i no longer play with it enabled and turn settings down so i can run @120fps.


Edit: If he is playing 64mp BF3, then the drops to 80fps would be down to the CPU, so no amount of GPU grunt will help with those minimums.
 
I play a mix of 32/48/64 player in BF3, I do play on lower settings but I notice drops down to 80 or so at times which is quite distracting. I guess it's probably not worth spending another 300 quid to try and get rid of it though. Thanks for the input.
 
DarkTheSupreme said:
I play a mix of 32/48/64 player in BF3, I do play on lower settings but I notice drops down to 80 or so at times which is quite distracting. I guess it's probably not worth spending another 300 quid to try and get rid of it though. Thanks for the input.
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It's not entirely graphic card fault I would think. With the 64 player maps, it is likely that even your overclocked i5 3570K can't keep it above 100fps at all time...the best thing to do is check your GPU usage to see if it dip below 99% to confirm. The chances are graphic aside, you might need something like a overclocked SandyBridge-E 6 cores to get constant 120fps.
 
Even CPUs with HT dont add that much FPS in BF its only a tiny improvement, games dont really use HT that much and gains are nothing major, i dont see how anything above 60 will do anything like Optimal said, just turn off the FPS counter and imagine your at 120 :P
 
weehamish said:
Even CPUs with HT dont add that much FPS in BF its only a tiny improvement, games dont really use HT that much and gains are nothing major, i dont see how anything above 60 will do anything like Optimal said, just turn off the FPS counter and imagine your at 120 :P
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I can definitely notice a difference when I drop below 100, even without FPS counters :(

Kaapstad said:
It will improve average and maximum but often the minimums can stay the same as a single card.
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Yeah, this is what I have read in a few places.
 
I tried Crossfiring 2 7850s on my P55 board with an i5 750 the other week.

Got less FPS than a single card. And some bad juddering on some games.
 
weehamish said:
Even CPUs with HT dont add that much FPS in BF its only a tiny improvement, games dont really use HT that much and gains are nothing major, i dont see how anything above 60 will do anything like Optimal said, just turn off the FPS counter and imagine your at 120 :P
Click to expand...

Wrong. An i7 actually can provide a large improvement ( relatively speaking ) over an i5 in BF3.
 
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