Can two Radeon 5970 cards be spaces one extra PCI-e slot apart?

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Undercover_Man

[H]ard Surgeon
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Hello. I want to get two PCI-e cards. I am not watercooling, therefore I am concerned about airflow and temps. I am in the planning stages of configuring airflow and figuring out which fans to get and stuff.

My question is about two 5970 cards. If you have them right on top of each other, the top card will not get fresh air through the ventilator. I was wondering if it was possible to move the bottom card down a slot. Would the supplies bridge reach? If not, is there a longer one I could buy somewhere? Is it not technically possible?

Just curious. If it's not possible, I'll have to do more research and figure out the best cooling solution for crossfired 5970's.

THANX
~ Undercover_Man
 
if you have 3 x16 PCI-E slots then yes, you can use slots 1 and 3, instead of thr normal 1 and 2
 
It depends on your motherboard and how it configures the pci express lanes.. it can be done a couple of ways.

All motherboards give the first slot 16x.. so

2nd slot 8x
3rd slot 8x

or

2nd slot 16x
3rd slot 1x

So just check your pci express lanes to verify it will work on your board.
 
Hmmm, it matters, I heard from a lot of people that when they did move of a card down the Crossfire bridge certainly did not reach both of the cards.

When I crossfire'd, I used the Asus crossfire bridges; they're a bit longer than the stock ATI ones.
 
Most boards have 16x16x4x or 16x8x8x. A 4x slot isn't fast enough and I've heard that 8x is still slightly bottlenecked. Physically, you may be able to get the brige to do it from ebay. I've seen long bridges for around $20 or so but I don't know if they're long enough. You could definitely put two together as long as you get some with manual fan control. You will not get the max overclock but something like 800mhz should be fine. The 5970 only runs super-hot with the terrible automatic fan profiles that are happy to keep the fan spinning at medium speed even when the card hits 100c.

I don't see why you would want two 5970's anyway. I used a 5970+5870 overclocked heavily and it was faster than 5970x2 with the limited overclocks it requires. It also uses less power, and you don't have to worry about temps since the 5870 can work fine with restricted airflow. Overall, I wouldn't recommend either though. The 1GB of memory is a major sticking point if you run 2560x1600 or higher and it won't let you use the cards to their full ability. Due to the bottleneck, there are only a few games where adding another card to a 5970 even helps. You get more power so you try to turn on the AA since the cards are only being used 60%, but then they start thrashing because they don't have enough memory. If you want something more than a 5970, wait for Fermi or 2GB ati cards.
 
My mobo has x16 x8 x16 x8 in that order. A regular (not extended) crossfire bridge just barely fits with the cards in the two x16 slots, and there is 1 pci slot gap between them. As others have said, the layout of all boards is different.
 
Pretty sure there are only a handful of x58 out there now that has a x16x16x16 set up. Asus P6T Rampage II and Foxconn Bloodrage are the only I know of.

But yea, 2x 5970 is kinda a waste. I'm running three 5870s and wish I hadn't wasted money on the third one... And coming from having used 2x 4870 X2s I know adding the second card actually hurt in more games that it helped.
 
Yes, I have heard that the ASUS bridges are longer than others. I just found THIS on their website store. This is the 5" version. Is that the long bridge that ppl are talking about?
 
I had to get a 10cm bridge from eBay to fit this EVGA board. Slot layout has a PCI-E x8 and PCI slot in between the two full x16 slots, so had to get the longer bridge. I'm using the non-NV200 version (760), which only has two x16 PCI-E slots.

MSI and Asus both have 10cm crossfire bridges, but you can only seem to find them on eBay.

Definitely check the x16 layout to ensure the slots you are using will operate at full speed.
 
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