Would this be recommended?

[Buchanan0204]

Looking at getting a friend an upgrade on his GPU. Currently a 285.

I'm looking at putting the 5850's in Xfire. Which according to This Bench Seems to be beating a GTX 580 in most tests!

Now that's a £150 saving. That's pretty good going. I'm no GPU expert or Gaming expert. However would this be a good idea? Not from a hardware point of view, I'm aware of power requirements, heat issues etc.

From a gaming point of view. Would games utilise the Xfire? Is it just certain games is what I mean or all games?

Seems crazy to get a 580 when you can Xfire these two cards and more juice out of them.

 

[opethdisciple]

All games are supported, as long as AMD have support for the game in the xfire profiles.

In other words, the performance of xfire'd cards is very much determined by driver and profile support.

When the drivers are solid and the profiles are there, then xfire will work great, but if the game isnt supported yet, or there are some xfire issues, then you will have problems, as expected.

I prefer single cards these days, I cant be bothered to deal with xfire/sli issues.

But dont let that put you off, £200 for xfire 5850 is damn good value for money.

 

[Buchanan0204]

Ahh sounds good. Where do you check the list of compatible games/profiles? Sorry for the daft question.

 

[James J]

Personally, if I was buying on a friends behalf I wouldnt go for either SLI or Xfire because theres problems with both on every new game that comes out and you constantly have to mess around with profiles on either setup. Because you suggested and bought that setup, your friend would most likely expect you to sort it out, every time something goes wrong. Due to that, get a single GPU setup, something like a 6950 and sleep sound

 

[Buchanan0204]

Personally, if I was buying on a friends behalf I wouldnt go for either SLI or Xfire because theres problems with both on every new game that comes out and you constantly have to mess around with profiles on either setup. Because you suggested and bought that setup, your friend would most likely expect you to sort it out, every time something goes wrong. Due to that, get a single GPU setup, something like a 6950 and sleep sound

Sounds very sensible. I shall bow to your greater knowledge and do just that.

Cheers