Crossfire advice please?

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GeezerButler

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Hi all,

Currently have i5-2500K at 4.2GHz on an MSI P67A-GD65 with Radeon 5850 at 5870 clocks. Monitor is 1920x1200. Would it be worth adding another 5850 while I can still get one? Would cost about £150 UK. Also would I be pushing my Enerma 625W PSU too hard? Finally what is crossfire like nowadays with performance and more importantly compatibility?

Thanks!
 
Coming from a user who has a Crossfire setup, don't. ATI apparently has poor driver support for Crossfire its not even funny, unless if you want to deal with headaches, I highly suggest that you stay away from Crossfire and get a new card instead, right now I'm encountering so many issues its not even funny and its not worth the money and time.
 
yeah, that was my main concern. Anyone else got any thoughts on this. Don't really want to get in to this if it's going to be a pita.
 
Well, for the 58xx series cards some people had a lot of issues with crossfire. People with the 57xx series didn't seem to have these problems. And so far crossfire with the 68xx and 69xx series cards seems to be working really well.

It would seem to be luck of the draw, you might get a second 5850 and everything will work great or you might be unlucky and it would cause you endless grief.

If I was in your situation I would buy a 6950/6970 or a GTX 570 and sell the 5850. Then later on down the road you would be able to get a second card if you think you needed it.
 
I have not had any in the games I play, except the 58xx cards just scale like crap compared to the 57xx and 6xxx series and Nv cards. Granted, I only recently started using Crossfire on a pair of 5870's shortly after the 6970 came out, so I was starting with drivers that had a year to mature.
Still, just to avoid anxiety, it would prolly be better if you just sold your 5850 and added it to the 150 you already have set aside and buy a single GPU solution.
 
thanks guys - think I will give it a miss. May just sell the 5850 while it's still got some resale value and get a faster single card.
 
GeezerButler said:
Hi all,

Currently have i5-2500K at 4.2GHz on an MSI P67A-GD65 with Radeon 5850 at 5870 clocks. Monitor is 1920x1200. Would it be worth adding another 5850 while I can still get one? Would cost about £150 UK. Also would I be pushing my Enerma 625W PSU too hard? Finally what is crossfire like nowadays with performance and more importantly compatibility?

Thanks!
Click to expand...


Xfire on the 69x series of cards is just fine and the performance benefits are major. Obviously, this would require the purchase of two cards since you only have a 58xx card, so it may not be feasible.

You may be able to sell the 58xx to someone who is looking for a second and use that money to help subsidize the 69xx purchase.

I went from 1 5870 to 2 6970s and do not regret it for a second.
 
I certainly don't regret either of my crossfire purchases, two 4870X2s, and now, two HD6970s. Driver problems have been pretty minor really.
 
I have heard that running CrossfireX on 5xxx cards can be a mixed bag, and while I can't speak to performance and/or issues on that series, aside from VERY few games not supporting it (FFXIV for example), I've been extremely pleased with my CrossfireX 6970s.

As to apps not supporting Crossfire, there are utilities such as RadeonPro which will allow you to force it.
 
karlowma said:
I have heard that running CrossfireX on 5xxx cards can be a mixed bag, and while I can't speak to performance and/or issues on that series, aside from VERY few games not supporting it (FFXIV for example), I've been extremely pleased with my CrossfireX 6970s.

As to apps not supporting Crossfire, there are utilities such as RadeonPro which will allow you to force it.
Click to expand...

Really it is the 58xx cards only for some reason. The 4xxx cards, 6xxx cards, and pretty much all other 5xxx cards scale just fine. The 58xx cards just did not scale as well. No clue why.
 
Don't do it unless your liquid cooling. The top cards run hot as hell... and I got two Sapphire Toxics which are supposed to run the coolest on air.
 
Eh, if they're sandwiched then that's true.. but that motherboard looks like it might have a little gap between the two. (Not sure.)

Crossfire is seemingly better for the newer 69xx series cards though. (Scaling, Bugs, Drivers, etc)
 
I have played with a set of 5850s on my UD7 and have had no issues, fast and smooth. Having said that, a single card is almost always better for compatibility....
 
I have two 6970s and encounter 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 "0" Problems with it or the drivers or crossfire.

So you probably have older crappy ATI products. The 6970 was designed under the watchful eye of AMD.
 
tangoseal said:
So you probably have older crappy ATI products. The 6970 was designed under the watchful eye of AMD.
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That's such an incredibly uninformed remark, it's pretty sad.

Crossfire has come a LONG way in the last 5 years or so. Support amongst games is excellent these days and problems are rare.

I have not seen any evidence that the 5xxx series scales poorly compared to any other series. There are plenty of benchmarks which show 69xx cards extending their lead over the 58xx cards in crossfire and in every case I’ve seen the results are quite obviously due to the increased VRam and running at a higher resolution. When running at 1920x1200 or lower the supposed improved crossfire scaling becomes nonexistent. Saying that 58xx cards scale poorly has become the trendy unsubstantiated remark to toss around these days.

Just the same, many crossfire issues can be attributed to user error, but why admit you did something wrong when there is such an easy scapegoat? Everyone knows ATI drivers suck amirite? :rolleyes:
 
Broken game profiles from CAP updates are not user error. Unless ofcourse AMD now ship cards with Radeon Pro and just say "Do it yourself."
 
I have had my 5850 cf setup for over a year now, playing many different games at 1080p and they have been nothing but a pleasure to use. I have had no problems at all. I'd keep them for a while longer if I weren't upgrading to a 30" 2560x1600 monitor soon. I plan on two 6970's, and if the scaling is that much better then I think I'm in for an absolute treat.
 
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I came from the HD 4870 CF setup and I really enjoyed its performance. I play lots of games and besides of Singularity (Which got fixed with RadeonPRO tool) and Hot Pursuit 2, never had any issue related to scaling or performance.
 
GeezerButler said:
thanks guys - think I will give it a miss. May just sell the 5850 while it's still got some resale value and get a faster single card.
Click to expand...

I would do that. I had a 4870x2, and I tried 4850 crossfire, and while the 4870x2 gave decent performance numbers, it had quirks and compatibility issues with a bunch of games (micro-stuttering is a bitch, really). The 4850 crossfire suffered because one of the links was PCI-E 4x (at least that's my theory on why it didn't scale well, they were identical cards in terms of clocks and memory sizes).

A faster single card is just easier to manage, and tends to use less power than two cards that perform at the same level, because you have less board traces to run power through and things like that.

Oh, and ATi's drivers suck. Don't even get me started on that.
 
They don't all suck. Just find that don't suck and use them. If a new version doesn't work, just roll back to the other one. No harm done. I'm still using the hotfix drivers from 6970 launch and I don't plan on going to 11.1a because of some bugs.
 
I would probably upgrade the PSU though it technically should support that set up. It really is close to where that PSU will start being unstable. I run Crossfire 5870s at 2560x1600 and did on my 1080p monitor as well. I have zero issues in any games that I play. I play WOW, BFBC2, MOH, and COD4. I have tried beta games like Rift without any issues. This was my first ATI setup and I have had it for a year and though I know some have complained of issues I do not have any and I would recommend the Crossfire set up to anyone if the performance is lacking at your settings or want to just make sure that you have some more punch if you go bigger on the monitor side. I am glad that I did with the bigger monitor that I just got since it actually pushes be down to 60 FPS in a lot of games not. If I only had one card I woudl be below 60 almost all the time and that is fine but I just don't like that on current gen console ports. I honestly had more quirks with my 9800GX2 SLI setup than I do with my 5870 Crossfire setup since I really haven't noticed anything in anything that I play with the Crossfire.
 
GeezerButler said:
Hi all,

Currently have i5-2500K at 4.2GHz on an MSI P67A-GD65 with Radeon 5850 at 5870 clocks. Monitor is 1920x1200. Would it be worth adding another 5850 while I can still get one? Would cost about £150 UK. Also would I be pushing my Enerma 625W PSU too hard? Finally what is crossfire like nowadays with performance and more importantly compatibility?

Thanks!
Click to expand...

first and foremost... look into the recal of your motherboard. Intel annouced a full recall of the 6series for a sata degradation issue. 700million in estimated losses. However with the two 5850's I have, the only issue I run into is a 2d screen flicker when overclocking. Only happens if I'm using multiple monitors "which is the point of xfire isnt it?" however the cards run great otherwise. This is coming from an Nvidia fanboi to be honest as well... They just didnt get in the game fast enough.
 
It seems to me like that doesn't happen when you use Afterburner instead of Overdrive. I think that it must change the memory clock in all states as you change it. You can pretty easily get rid of flicker on any ATI card by ripping your BIOS with GPU-Z and modifying every power state to have the same memory clock and then reflash it though.
 
MaK2000 said:
It seems to me like that doesn't happen when you use Afterburner instead of Overdrive. I think that it must change the memory clock in all states as you change it. You can pretty easily get rid of flicker on any ATI card by ripping your BIOS with GPU-Z and modifying every power state to have the same memory clock and then reflash it though.
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I have modified every settings, in registry, profiles, and use smartdoctor to load specific profiles @ 1.1v 800/1100 effective from boot. still happens.
 
If you do the BIOS mod then it is not really possible for it to happen. If you load open GPU-Z on the sensors tab then you should see that the flicker happens when the memory clock changes. If you set the memory clocks all the same to your overclocked frequency then it should go away. Have you tried Afterburner instead of SmartDoctor? It really seems to not happen with Afterburner for me.
 
Afterburner actually was the worse of the three between Smartdoctor, and overdrive. I modded the bios's to the ASUS 5850 custom provided on another forum.
 
I had 5850's in xfire and I can't recall having any issues. I was running eyefinity at the time and there was a noticeable improvement when I added my second card.
 
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