Since no search I will post, Crossfire vs. SLI?

C

comikehill2002

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jan 27, 2005
Messages
416
I am thinking of going CF over SLI, I have always been an Nvidia fan, but for my price point now, 3850's are looking good, what are some of the better things about CF or ATI for that matter?

Thanks to all that respond and don't flame :D
 
Crossfire no longer requires the external dongle, so cabling is on par with SLI; this was something that SLI fans used against Crossfire when comparing the two.

You get the option of using AMD chipsets (if going AMD), or using Intel chipsets (if going Intel). To use SLI you must use an NV chipset based board.
 
Just FYI, 9600GT is supposed to be out in a couple weeks according to many sites, and it offers performance that is almost equal to the 8800GT in many cases, for the price of the 3850.

Maybe you don't want to wait, or maybe you prefer ATI, but it's something to consider. That said, you won't be able to SLI the card on an AMD or Intel chipset.
 
comikehill2002 said:
I am thinking of going CF over SLI, I have always been an Nvidia fan, but for my price point now, 3850's are looking good, what are some of the better things about CF or ATI for that matter?

Thanks to all that respond and don't flame :D
Click to expand...

I believe CF now supports dual monitors. (or maybe that's just CrossfireX, same thing really anyway.)
 
Sr7 said:
Just FYI, 9600GT is supposed to be out in a couple weeks according to many sites, and it offers performance that is almost equal to the 8800GT in many cases, for the price of the 3850.

Maybe you don't want to wait, or maybe you prefer ATI, but it's something to consider. That said, you won't be able to SLI the card on an AMD or Intel chipset.
Click to expand...

Not the 8800 GT. The 9600 GT is supposed to be a bit slower than the old 8800 GTS 640. The 8800 GT is in a totally different league.
 
Crossfire scales better than SLI... two 3870s in Crossfire are as fast as 2 8800GTs in SLI, even though the 3870s are slower in single-card performance.
 
Silus said:
Not the 8800 GT. The 9600 GT is supposed to be a bit slower than the old 8800 GTS 640. The 8800 GT is in a totally different league.
Click to expand...

No, it's slightly slower than the 8800GT. What I said was not a mistake.
 
Sr7 said:
No, it's slightly slower than the 8800GT. What I said was not a mistake.
Click to expand...

Let's see here:

Feature, 8800GT, 9600 GT
Stream Processors, 112, 64
Core Clock, 600, 650
Shader Clock, 1500, 1625
Memory Type, GDDR3, GDDR3
Memory Bus Width, 256, 256
Memory Clock, 900, 900
Direct X10, Shader 4.0, Shader 4.0
PCI-E, 2.0, 2.0

From the preliminary specs on the 9600GT that I can find, it should be CONSIDERABLY slower than the 8800GT on all but the simplest games that don't use shaders because almost all clock speeds are no more than 10% faster, but the number of shaders is almost HALF. It will be considerably faster than the 8600GT though.
 
bbf said:
Let's see here:

Feature, 8800GT, 9600 GT
Stream Processors, 112, 64
Core Clock, 600, 650
Shader Clock, 1500, 1625
Memory Type, GDDR3, GDDR3
Memory Bus Width, 256, 256
Memory Clock, 900, 900
Direct X10, Shader 4.0, Shader 4.0
PCI-E, 2.0, 2.0

From the preliminary specs on the 9600GT that I can find, it should be CONSIDERABLY slower than the 8800GT on all but the simplest games that don't use shaders because almost all clock speeds are no more than 10% faster, but the number of shaders is almost HALF. It will be considerably faster than the 8600GT though.
Click to expand...

It should handily out-do a 3850 though according to some of the early benches
 
I dont know why everyone says CF scales better, In the games that do work with CF it does some times outdo an nvidia if you can compare that- but since you cant really as every GPU is different in the two brands, i have not seen a single - Equal GPU from either side- so its really just dependant on what card you buy.

All I can say is there are a couple of games where CF doenst register and when taht happens your cards perf acts worse than a single card in which case at this point is just pretty bad...
 
For just a little more than those 3850's, you can get a 3870X2 and already have seemless crossfire, and if you decide to you can add another 3870X2 in a few months. Then you have 4 GPU's working for you....
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top