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Crossfire 5970

C

crydex

Weaksauce
Joined
Feb 14, 2011
Messages
65
Hey,

I am interested in putting two 5970's in crossfire as I already own one XFX 5970 Black edition. Do you think the cost of an additional card is worth the performance increase?

System specs:

Intel i7 920 @ 4.2
12gb ram/win 7 ultimate (64)
X58 SLI LE
 
Save your money, the 5970 is fine for now, if you have the itch for something faster I would wait to see what the 6990 or the next nvidia cards have to offer on the horizon.
 
Yeah. If you want an upgrade, go 6990. Besides, what is your psu? Need to upgrade that too for another 5970? Not worth it.
 
In this instance I'd say no. If this was about a year ago, before the HD6 series had appeared, I'd say go for it. My experiences with Quadfire, once I had the rest of the hardware (PSU, M/B) sorted out, were actually pretty good with 4870X2s, and while I see a lot of hate for the HD5 series as far as crossfire goes, there's plenty of people I've spoken to who say they had hardly any issues, so it can't always be bad.

However, fact is, unless it's very cheap to get an HD5970 it isn't worth it. QuadCF doesn't scale that well compared to two cards and never has done. Ultimately you'll get maybe 20% more performance with two HD5970s as you would with two HD6970s, and you'd be using 600W versus 400W to do it.
If you're willing to dabble with more than 2 GPUs, wait until the HD6990 is released, and grab one of those, in addition to either a second HD6990 or just a single card of whatever the HD6990 is based on (likely to be either a 6870 or 6950) and run three GPUs. Tri-Crossfire works reasonably well at the moment as long as you don't use large eyefinity resolutions.
 
I have a friend that did "quad-fire" 2 5970's ... lots of BSOD's ... so, really, not worth it!

Off-topic: I really think that the future is going single GPU ... SLI/CF is not new and still not stable... :x
 
No graphics-related BSODs here for over a year, and in that time I've been running 4870X2QuadCF and 6970CF. People who think crossfire isn't stable clearly don't understand how to use it.
 
In all honesty, its not worth it. I went for dual 5970's last summer and haven't been terribly impressed. There were some driver and stability issues initially, but catalyst support has improved in the past 3-4 months.

While the performance is good, I would not double up and quadfire today. I would personally say wait and see how your single 5970 will handle the big games of 2011 and decide from there.
 
Typical performance stacks up something like this. Don't think I've missed anything out.

HD6970
HD5830CF
GTX460 SLI
GTX580
GTX460 1GB SLI
HD5850CF
HD5970 -> Your current setup, 290W ish.
HD6850CF
GTX470 SLI
HD5870CF
HD6870CF
GTX480 SLI
GTX570 SLI
HD6950CF
HD5850 Tri-CF / 5970+5850
HD6970CF
GTX470 Tri-SLI
GTX580 SLI
HD5870 Tri-CF
HD6950 Tri-CF
HD5970 CF -> What you're aiming for, 600W ish total
GTX480 Tri-SLI
HD6970 Tri-CF -> What you could go for instead, 600W ish total, more reliable scaling
HD5870 Quad-CF
HD6950 Quad-CF
GTX580 Tri-SLI
HD6970 Quad-CF
 
*shrugs*. I have two BEs in XFire running three 24" in Eyefinity and don't have any complaints....save for the games that blow chunks in XFire mode.
 
I haven't found that many games fitting that description really. Most that do don't need crossfire's performance in the first place.
 
Thanks for all the advice! I've decided to hold off on the GFX card update untill I see what the new releases look like.

A side question to the 5970 users: Do you find that your second GPU only seems to run when you have a game client running in full screen mode?
 
Crossfire (including dual cards like the 3870X2/4870X2/5970/6990) can only ever function in full-screen. It is impossible to run multi-GPU in windowed mode. This applies to both crossfire and SLI.
 
I see no reason to ever use windowed mode for any demanding game, so it's no issue for me.
 
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