Crossfire? bottleneck?

Master_Pain

Master_Pain

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How much of a performance increase would I see from running Sapphire x1950 pros in crossfire versus only one x1950 in gaming?

I also am going to be running an Athlon X2, what speed will I need for it not to bottleneck with 1 vid card? and what speed for crossfire?
 
Matters the resolution/AA/AF levels you want to game with...... I would say you will not reap the total reward going crossfire w/ that CPU (unless running 3.0ghz+).
 
Ok, How bout this, what speed AMD cpu would I need to run 1 Sapphire x1950 pro w/ 512mb of ram to its maximum potential? I would also have 2gb of system of ram.
 
Master_Pain said:
Ok, How bout this, what speed AMD cpu would I need to run 1 Sapphire x1950 pro w/ 512mb of ram to its maximum potential? I would also have 2gb of system of ram.
Click to expand...

If you crank up the res and eye candy enough, the bottleneck will be the gpu, not cpu..
Of course you could be like my dumbass kid.. She just bought a 8800gtx, but her current 19" lcd monitor only supports 1280x1024 :eek: ...
 
As already said, it depends what you're doing with it. What res and with what AA/AF levels will you be gaming at?
 
1280x1024, until i get a widescreen, and then 1440x900, with all the eye candy turned on to max.
 
All I can say is that with two X1900XTs in Crossfire I was still CPU bottlenecked with my Opteron 170 (dual-core) at 2.7Ghz. If you're only running 1280x1024 two X1950s should be able to handle it easily - if you're sticking to AMD I'd suggest an Opteron 165/170 or equivalent - something that runs at at least 2Ghz, and then clock it up a bit, 2.4Ghz is very easily reachable with these chips and is what I use day-to-day. The only issues I've had running at 1600x1200 are having to drop AA from 16x to 8x or 4x for some intensive games, and that STALKER doesn't like Crossfire (no XP x64 hotfix as yet despite 32-bit XP and 64-bit Vista ones, :mad:), otherwise everything stays on max.
 
How much of a performance increase would I see from going one x1950 to going crossfire? I read somewhere about 10%, but I'm not sure. I am trying to decide if I want to get crossfire right away, or just wait awhile. I think I will be happy with just one card though, I am upgrading from a 9800 pro :p
 
I know it's not a real game, and these are X1900s not X1950s, but adding a second card did this to my 3DMark scores:

01 : 33778 > 35211 ( > 36636 when optimised, no longer clock-for-clock)
03 : 18625 > 30981 ( > 31364)
05 : 11506 (> 15246)
06 : 5900 > 9188 ( > 9438)
 
So about a 30% increase there, thanks man.

Anyone know where there are some 1950pro figures like that?
 
Hmm - not sure how you're getting 30%? I suppose 05 is close to that but that's the lowest one, except 01 which is obviously CPU limited.

01 : 33778 > 35211 = 4% (don't know what's going on there!)
03 : 18625 > 30981 = 66%
05 : 11506 > 15246 = 33%
06 : 5900 > 9188 = 56%
 
Sorry, I had a bad mental math answer :p
But anywho, would it be a huge difference in gaming? Or is it mainly just 3dmark scores? Like what would be the percent increase in gaming?

thanks for the help man
 
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