Crossfire and different generations?

[Stupid_Newbie]

I'm new to cf, well not even there yet, but I'm getting ready to piece my water cooling together, and am curious about different generation crossfire.

Here is my situation. I would like to go cf for skyrim and future titles. Also a few I didn't get to play. But I'm looking at a very busy winter with work. Probably 12hr days till Xmas, 3 days off and on it again. So not sure how much gaming I'll get in. So I'm torn right now. Order a second ek 6870 non reference block, and grab another tfii 6950 (and unlock/run at 6970 lightning speeds) or wait till early year when I will have more time, and maybe add a 7950 on liquid.

Does cf work well across generations? Does it scale well with say 6700 series and 6900 etc. or 5000 and 6000 series cards?

Since right now at 1080 res a 6950 will do but come Xmas/jan when a large texture pack for skyrim comes out along with other improvements a second card and high oc is gonna be needed for smooth frame rates

 

[dsa44]

I'm new to cf, well not even there yet, but I'm getting ready to piece my water cooling together, and am curious about different generation crossfire.

Here is my situation. I would like to go cf for skyrim and future titles. Also a few I didn't get to play. But I'm looking at a very busy winter with work. Probably 12hr days till Xmas, 3 days off and on it again. So not sure how much gaming I'll get in. So I'm torn right now. Order a second ek 6870 non reference block, and grab another tfii 6950 (and unlock/run at 6970 lightning speeds) or wait till early year when I will have more time, and maybe add a 7950 on liquid.

Does cf work well across generations? Does it scale well with say 6700 series and 6900 etc. or 5000 and 6000 series cards?

Since right now at 1080 res a 6950 will do but come Xmas/jan when a large texture pack for skyrim comes out along with other improvements a second card and high oc is gonna be needed for smooth frame rates

Hey just cuz you're a newbie doesn't mean you're stupid, you build your own rigs don't ya? Any way, afaik, you can't crossfire different generations, ie, cant cfx a 5950 with 6950. You can match within, tho, say a 6950 with a 6970 but it would default to the lower speeds. Since you already have a 6950 at 6970 speeds, thats quite a powerful chip and since you are only gaming at 1080, wait to see what (if they arrive) the added texture or dx11 pak will do to skyrim. It might just last you until the 79xx come out. Also, afaik, skyrim is internally capped at 60 fps.
Cheers.

 

[sirmonkey1985]

you can't do crossfire across generations. what you can do is crossfire between families.. eg 6900 series you can mix any of the 3 cards with each other in crossfire.. 6800 series 5800 series 5700 series.. so on and so on.. but you can't say add a 6970 with a 6870 in crossfire or a 6970 with a 5870. its still limited but either way its better then anything Nvidia has with SLI.

as far as the high res pack with skyrim. i doubt GPU performance is going to be the performance limitation. if anything it will be video memory limitations similar to crysis 2's high res pack requiring a crap load more video memory but not a whole lot more gpu performance. which crossfire won't really help if that ends up being the case.