crossfire newb questions

S

Sven_Lee

Limp Gawd
Joined
Sep 1, 2004
Messages
212
Ok I have purchased two Radeon HD 4850 cards and I'm having a hard time getting crossfire to work. I don't know anything about crossfire or SLI, this is my first time trying to do this. I'm using an ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe mobo. I plugged in the two cards, I connected them with one of the crossfire connectors, I switched that little panel on the mobo from "Single Video Card" to "Dual Video Cards", I plugged in a power cord to the EZ Plug on my mobo and of course the power cords to the cards themselves. I went through my BIOS and made sure everything there was set properly.

I installed CCC and Catalyst drivers 8.8 and I'm running Vista 64 bit. I don't see any settings for crossfire in the CCC and I'm kinda stuck on what to do now. Can someone please point me to a step-by-step guide on what I need to do, or, if you could be so kind as to guide me through it yourselves, I would really appreciate it. Thanks.

-Sven
 
Yeah, sven, your motherboard doesn't support Crossfire since it's based off a Nvidia chipset. You can only use SLI on your motherboard. So either A) get a new Intel based motherboard or B) Return those HD4850 cards and get a pair of 8800GT or 9800GTX+ cards.
 
Ok well that goes to show you how out of date I am with PC tech these days.. Anyways, I've got my eye on a couple of nVidia GeForce 9600 GT OC cards at Best Buy for a good price.. How are those compared to my 4850's? They were the highest grade nVidia cards Best Buy had on their shelves. Just a quick general snippet of info on how the 9600 GTOC compares to the 4850 will do. I'm not very good at researching these things on my own. Thanks.

-Sven
 
A 4850 is much faster than a 9600GT. Don't buy your hardware from bestbuy, they are a huge rip off. They take the retail, or sometimes bump it up, and place it on a yellow "sale" tag so that you think you're getting a great deal.

Buy whatever you want from newegg. How much do you intend to spend? What processor do you have? If you end up having a slower processor (which would bottleneck your graphics cards anyway), it might be worth upgrading the motherboard/processor to something crossfire compatible. Otherwise, if you have to stick with the mobo you have and want to run SLI, I'd get 2 9800GTX+'s which are meant to compete directly with the 4850's you have, and they basically tie.

The only problem then is that if you swap the card for the 9800GTX+, you have to make sure you have enough connectors (4 6pin PCIE power connectors) to power your 2 gpus since the 4850 only needs 1 connector per card.
 
mobo- ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe
proc- AMD Athlon 64 3200+ Winchester 2.0ghz
Eagle Tech Powerone 570w power supply

And keep in mind I would be going from running One ATI 4850 to running Two 9600GTOC's with SLI.
 
I'd say you'd see roughly the same performance.. the SLI config would win some and lose some. The OC versions would likely be faster than what you have though, but not by much.
 
Don't buy 2 cards. With that cpu, being single core and older, it would bottleneck on any of them Buy ONE 4850 and wait untill your next CPU/mobo upgrade.
 
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