Crossfire installation procedure for Radeon 4850?

[Retroactive]

Hello folks,

I am a newbie at setting up a discrete crossfire installation. I had been using an all in one solution 3870X2. OK, I purchased 2 Radeon 4850 cards and would like to know the procedure for setup in a crossfire arrangement. I thought this would be discussed in the manual on the supplied CD-ROM - it wasn't unfortunately. And the latest procedure I found on ATI was for the 3800 series which apparently has a different pin-out arrangement than the 4800 series cards.

Now I do know that I have to install these in adjacent PCI-e slots and connect the necessary power connectors. But what do I do with the crossfire connectors themselves?

I see that each card has two sets of male connectors at the top of the card. Do I connect just one crossfire jumper/connector between the cards or do I connect two crossfire connectors between the two cards?

If it is just one connector, what set of pins do I choose? The one closest to the vertical riser or the one towards the middle of the card?

Once I have the crossfire set up - which is the master card? And which video port do I use? Or are all video outputs live and providing an output signal?

I assume that the software installation is as simple as loading the latest drivers and there is nothing special that needs to be performed within the Catalyst Control Center?

Oh one other thing - I do have a crossfire capable MB (it is a intel X48 chipset), I am guessing that there is nothing I need to enable or change within the Bios?

Any guidance or installation procedure would be helpful. Thank you for helping a crossfire newbie out!!

 

[bitgod]

Honestly, I think it's just slap the cards in, slap the crossfire cables on, fire up the computer, install the drivers. That's what worked for me. There seems to be a little debate on if you need both cables, but most people say to use both, and I use both. I have both facing so that the text on the cable is facing towards the direction of the fan on the card, I've seen pictures of them going in either direction, so I think it works in either direction. I was tempted to have each go in a different direction for the look, decided I better not.

Other than that, plug in the power, turned it on, used a driver cleaner to make sure the old nvidia stuff was gone, installed the ATI drivers, that's it. The crossfire option in the driver control panel was already checked by default.

Oh, and I have my monitor plugged into the "first" video card, don't know if that matters or not.

 

[Spaxspore]

Honestly, I think it's just slap the cards in, slap the crossfire cables on, fire up the computer, install the drivers. That's what worked for me. There seems to be a little debate on if you need both cables, but most people say to use both, and I use both. I have both facing so that the text on the cable is facing towards the direction of the fan on the card, I've seen pictures of them going in either direction, so I think it works in either direction. I was tempted to have each go in a different direction for the look, decided I better not.

Other than that, plug in the power, turned it on, used a driver cleaner to make sure the old nvidia stuff was gone, installed the ATI drivers, that's it. The crossfire option in the driver control panel was already checked by default.

Oh, and I have my monitor plugged into the "first" video card, don't know if that matters or not.

Yep thats pretty much it. The hardest bit is make sure you have enough Power, sapce and thats about it

 

[Frostex]

Honestly, I think it's just slap the cards in, slap the crossfire cables on, fire up the computer, install the drivers.

I swear after I saw the title of this thread, I clicked specifically to type that excat same thing

Just Slap the cards in
Slap the crossfire bridge on (only need 1)
Slap the side of the case back on
Slap the cat out of the way
Boot up
Slap the drivers on
Xfire should be enabled by default.

Keep an eye on temps and take a trip by the thread on creating custom fanspeed settings to lower them if they're outrageous like mine were

 

[Retroactive]

I have both cards installed, downloaded the beta drivers from ATI/AMD and apparently everything is working great. I took some synthetic benchmarks of the new setup and found a worthwhile performance boost over the 9800GX2.

Here was my prior setup:

6-26-08, Core 2 Quad 9450, Gigabyte X48-DQ6 v6 bios, Nvidia 9800GX2 V175.19 drivers, 4GB Mushkin DDR2-1066@5-5-5-15, 1TB Seagate SATA. Vista Ultimate Spk1(production) - no OC

Everything was running at stock - my 3dMark 2003 score was 57,421.

I repeated the benchmark today:

7-04-08, Core 2 Quad 9450, Gigabyte X48-DQ6 v6 bios, ATI 4850 Crossfire beta drivers, 4GB Mushkin DDR2-1066@5-5-5-15, 1TB Seagate SATA. Vista Ultimate Spk1(production) - no OC

Again everything is running at stock speeds. My 3D-Mark 2003 score was 62,568.

I am pretty happy with this and the dual 4850 actually cost less than the 9800GX2, which will be going up on e-bay on Sunday.

Again thanks for the help and I will explore the fan control options that were suggested.