Right now I have a mobo with only 1 PCI-E x16 slot and a Radeon HD 3870. i wasnt planning on going dual cards but now I kinda want to so I'd have to buy a new mobo (the mobo i have right now is really crappy and wanted to get a new 1 anyways) and another Radeon HD 3870 but i dont have the money for those right now anyways lol but is it worth having a crossfire set up? from what i herd having SLI is only a 30% boost so is it the same with crossfire? i have seen alot of pcs with dual Radeon HD 3870s (NOT the single Radeon HD 3870x2) but not too much the nvidia's 8800s
I'm doing exactly this (crossfire 3870s) in about a week's time, so hold fire and I'll let you know how I get on.
personally i would go all the way with SLI to get any decent performance boost from ur cards. 2 x 8800s in dual SLI playing crysis sucks a tthe minute which nvidia have identified with SLI i think the key is all or nothing you gotta have decent hardware otherwise it just flops never had a radeon HD 3870 how does it run new games like crysis etc then i might be able to help more Crossfire wont be much different except the name but ATI have seemed to nail it on the head. how much were you planning on spending a new card and motherboard?
From what I keep reading, Crossfire seems to work absolute wonders for quite a few games, Crysis included, but only if you get it right. Large numbers of people say it does nothing, and yet large enough numbers of people post pictorial evidence of it working fine... I'll have to wait and see, none of the aD regulars really use it.... yet.
i was planning on getting another HIS Radeon 3870, but I have herd really good reports on VisionTek. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814161218 or http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814129100 as for a mobo i was gonna go with a http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128074 or http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128075 im not too sure if this one has crossfire support cuz it doesnt say if it does or not as for running crysis with a single Radeon HD 3870 im getting around 35-40 frames on all settings on High and on 1280x768 and on medium i get 75-80 frames. Thats with just mostly walking around though, the most enemies i had on screen was 3. another thing i wanted to ask about was that there are 2 identical HIS Radeon HD 3870 cards on newegg, only differences seem to be are 45 bucks, my GPU Frequency is 780MHz, the other has 850MHz. My GPU memory frequency is 1130MHz, the other 1 is 2380MHz. Does this mean i could just OC my card to the specs of the other card and have it work fine? here are the 2 cards http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814161218 *my GPU* http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814161217
The HIS pre-overclocked ones seem to have a few issues. I can overclock my Powercolor card to 860/2720 without any problems. Either of those motherboards look fine.
so should i just not overclock or would it not show much effect? what kinda of problems of the pre-overclocked HIS have? also I was wondering about those PPUs (PhysX Processing Unit) http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814143055 they seem to improve graphics on a very few amount of games but they are really suppose to take a load off of the GPU and CPU making smoother gameplay and higher framerates on all games/programs. Got alot of good reviews but its PCI so how good could it possibly be? it cost 145 bucks and from what the reviews where telling me is that you really get your bucks worth out of it. it also gives about 1k points on 3D Mark 06
Sorry to barge in here, but you could save yourself a bit of cash and get a 3870X2 - that way you wont need another PCI-e slot.
400 bucks though....from what i seen its only about 2-4 frames better then having 2 Radeon HD 3870s crossfire. i think im just gonna wait for sammorris and see what he thinks about it first. man money is a real issue right now, i probably shouldnt of made that gaming pc but o well i can play crysis now lol. i really needed it though, had a 4 year old dell and just wasnt cutting lol. right now i owe my parents 230 bucks and only working 3 days a week for 4-5 hours per day. the job i have right now is actually OVERemployed -_- im lucky to have 3 days. looking for another job to help bring in some more cash though so i wont be buying this for awhile. maybe ATI will make a new card by then
nah, don't bother with the HD3870X2, it has a MAJOR flaw in that if a game doesn't support crossfire to the extent that it doesn't even load if you have it enabled, then you can't disable it and let you play the game with single card performance, you just have to live without ever being able to play that game. With two cards you can at least disable crossfire. The PhysX cards are useless. Don't bother with them. The reviewers are all idiots. What the PhysX card does is increase the level of physics in VERY FEW games, in the vast majority of titles it does nothing. Increasing the level of physics means there's more for your graphics card to render, and therefore you get decreased performance.
