Go crossfire or just upgrade?

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treepop

Weaksauce
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I just got myself a MSI 890GXM-G65 Motherboard as part of a combo deal. I am considering selling it unopened because I am considering getting another 4870 and running it in crossfire.

My question is: Is it worth going crossfire? or would I be better off (performance wise) just upgrading and selling my 4870?

Thanks
 
Depends on how much you can buy a HD4870 for.

Crossfire'd HD4870 ~= HD5870 (or an overclocked HD5850).

So your looking at $300-450 new for the HD58** series minus ~$120 for your HD4870. The Crossfire'd HD4870 won't have Eyefinity or Directx11, but should be cheaper. Used I see the HD4870 sell for ~$120.

This assumes your have the 1GB HD4870 version. If its the 512MB sell it for sure and at least the get HD5850.
 
treepop said:
I just got myself a MSI 890GXM-G65 Motherboard as part of a combo deal. I am considering selling it unopened
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So you are planning to use the board in your signature for crossfire then?

I think the 965 can only do 16x/4x crossfire, and those are PCIe 1.0 slots so it would be like 8x/2x on a modern PCIe 2.0 board.

4870 crossfire is powerful but it all comes down to you having a board that can do proper crossfire and how good of a deal you can get on a 4870.
 
You have the 1GB version so it might be worth it to get a 4870 1GB or crossfire it with a 4890.
 
Thank you guys for the input.

I will be running this with a phenom II x4 and the motherboard I mentioned or a 790FX, in addition I have already acquired DDR3 ram. The rest of my sig will stay the same.

I see 4870's for $100 used quite frequently. Another option would be to get used 4870x2.

I do see that direct 11 might be something of importance later on though. So waiting until I absolutely need a new card and then upgrading it might be the best option. Since it will net me the latest technology. Though knowing how technology goes, There will be pciE 3.0 and ddr4 and will require 1200watts of power, thus making my entire setup obsolete :(.

This is a lot to chew.

*edit*

I didn't know I could crossfire with a 4890? I thought they had to be identical?
 
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Sure you could tri-fire with a 4870x2 but if you are going to keep using your corsair 620 that would be a bit much I think. I ran a single 4870x2 with an earthwatts 650 but I felt like I was near the limit.

As far as cards having to be identical it is a lot more flexible than SLI for example. They don't have to be identical, just from the same family. The 4830, 4850, 4870, 4890, 4870x2, and 4850x2 can all be used together in crossfire in any combination up to 4 GPUs total. What it will do though is run all GPUs at the speed of the slowest. So if you did crossfire with a 4870 and 4890 for example, it would work and that is a supported configuration but it would be identical to two 4870's. You would gain nothing having that 2nd card be a 4890 over another 4870.
 
treepop said:
*edit*

I didn't know I could crossfire with a 4890? I thought they had to be identical?
Click to expand...

If you can get another 4870 1GB for $100 and you're not interested in DX11 or Eyefinity, then that would make more sense for you.

Don't bother trying to crossfire a 4870 with a 4890 as the other card would need to slow itself down to 4870 levels. And crossfire appears to scale poorly above 2 gpus, so adding a 4870x2 wouldn't be very cost-effective either.
 
I was thinking about doing the same. I've got a 4850 but only play games on a 19" monitor so resolution isn't really high enough.
 
vjcsmoke said:
If you can get another 4870 1GB for $100 and you're not interested in DX11 or Eyefinity, then that would make more sense for you.

Don't bother trying to crossfire a 4870 with a 4890 as the other card would need to slow itself down to 4870 levels. And crossfire appears to scale poorly above 2 gpus, so adding a 4870x2 wouldn't be very cost-effective either.
Click to expand...

Eyefinity doesn't interest me in the least, while DX10 is still hardly used let alone DX11, so hopefully by the time DX11 is mainstream I can score myself a 5870 or something for ~$200.

What I meant by 4870x2 was. Selling my current 4870 and buying a 4870x2 and keeping the non crossfire mobo.

so it seems most agree that crossfire performance would be pretty good with another 4870 and could potentially hang with the current top dogs?

Thanks
 
2 4870's sort of equal the 5870 performance but without direct x 11 features. I would just upgrade to a 5870 or 5850.
 
If you could sell the 4870 for around $120-130, and put in another $170, you can get yourself a 5850.

BUT 4870 1gig in xfire is just as fast or a lil bit slower then 1 5870.

Either way you cant go wrong with either choice....but if you get a 5850 now, you can xfire it later down the road...

Tough decision you got indeed lol
 
IF you can sell your current stuff and upgrade, That would be the better choice IMO. Uses less power and you can eliminate any new game/crossfire issues that may pop up
 
vjcsmoke said:
Don't bother trying to crossfire a 4870 with a 4890 as the other card would need to slow itself down to 4870 levels.
Click to expand...

That is NOT true. 4890 will NOT slow down to a 4870 speed. Please don't comment as such unless you really tried them.

4870+4890 > 4870+4870.
 
kppanic said:
That is NOT true. 4890 will NOT slow down to a 4870 speed. Please don't comment as such unless you really tried them.

4870+4890 > 4870+4870.
Click to expand...

It won't actually clock itself down, but you won't see 100% GPU usage on that card either.

I experimented doing mixed crossfire using a 4870x2 and a 4850 512mb and it performed exactly as I would have expected from 4850 512mb tri-fire.
 
GotNoRice said:
It won't actually clock itself down, but you won't see 100% GPU usage on that card either.

I experimented doing mixed crossfire using a 4870x2 and a 4850 512mb and it performed exactly as I would have expected from 4850 512mb tri-fire.
Click to expand...

When I tested 4870 + 4890 crossfire it came out to be about 7% faster overall than when going 4870 + 4870. I tested COD4, Crysis, TF2, LFD and forgot another game. COD4 had the biggest difference and Crysis saw negligeable gain (read: no gain :p)

I don't know much about Trifire and can't comment on it as I never got to try one.

However your experiment had introduced another variable: framebuffer. I bet $100 that you were actually limited by the 512MB of ram on the 4850. Had you used a 1GB 4850, the results would have been different.
 
That's good to know...this way, if I see a hella deal on a 4870x2 or 4890 I can snag it and still pair it with my 4870 for increased performance!

In addition, I don't see a huge benefit to waiting for the 890fx...it has native usb3 and sata3, but you can get those features on a GIGABYTE GA-790FXTA-UD5. So why on earth would I wait? Also, I think I get max flexibility for incremental upgrades with the older 790fx....am I missing something?
 
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