Motherboard/CPU for 3 way Crossfire

Atarax

Atarax

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Jan 7, 2017
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Hello all,
Recently been working on planning my yearly pic upgrade and have decided that I would like to 3-way crossfire 3 290s.
I've started to hit a bit of a snag though, I'm a bit afraid that my pcie slots won't have enough bandwidth to exploit the extra power.
Anyone have any experience with 3x290s in their builds?
I'm looking to upgrade my mobo and CPU in the future, and would like one that can handle 3-4 way crossfire.
 
Going new the cheapest option to get 40 lanes would be a 6850 and any good enthusiast x99 board.

If you can find one cheap enough you can go used with a 3960x, but I haven't looked into 2011 SB-E motherboards to comment on price or availability.
 
Do you already have the 290's? What are you trying to achieve with running 3 low end gpu's?
 
Hagrid said:
Do you already have the 290's? What are you trying to achieve with running 3 low end gpu's?
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I wouldnt say their low end lol maybe mid range now days and with how bad crossfire support is not sure how much hes going to get out of them
 
not to mention the power requirement for 3-4 290x, you need like 1000w+ psu! and then you have too cool them...
do you have them already is a very good q! what do you have now and what is the intended purpose?
 
pendragon1 said:
not to mention the power requirement for 3-4 290x, you need like 1000w+ psu! and then you have too cool them...
do you have them already is a very good q! what do you have now and what is the intended purpose?
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good point he likely could sell all 3 290s and get a better single card thats more powerful and uses less power.
 
Let's say you can get $150 for a 290, that's $450, that's a GTX 1070 roughly. Now, to even out generations, we could agree, I think, that the 980 Ti and the GTX 1070 is roughly the same. Check https://forums.anandtech.com/thread...le-gtx980ti-with-5960x.2438793/#post-37546487 https://hardforum.com/threads/swap-xfire-r9-290s-for-980-ti.1866825/#post-1041695166 for the performance of two 290 vs 980 Ti -- they are roughly equal. So: from a pure price-performance standpoint of the GPUs this is not a bad idea. If we add, however that the TDP of 290 is some 275W (Guru3D calculated real world 255W) then we are talking of a staggering 825W in the GPU department vs 180W. This is where things stop making sense: power and cooling 825W worth of GPU is no small feat. You would need a gigantic chassis and lots of radiators. Perhaps 4 x 180mm worth of rads is enough for the whole system.

You can do three things

  1. Go with triple CF because you want it. Look for the big Thermaltake cases: X9, The Tower. Also remember EKWB has SLI/CF blocks. This will save a lot of tubing.
  2. Buy a GTX 1080
  3. Wait for Vega.
 
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Wow, thanks for all the replies guys.
I have all the GPUs and got nearly all of them for less than $100 with water blocks. They will be water cooled with aquacomputer blocks & the SLI connector.
I already have a corsair ax1500w that I got for peanuts.
I will have a core x71 full tower.
The reason I'm going with 3x 290s is that they have drastically dropped in price and I'm looking to upgrade my rig to 4K standard on a budget.
 
im not sure they will do 4k with amds lack luster crossfire support as of late.
 
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Bal3W0lf said:
im not sure they will do 4k with amds lack luster crossfire support as of late.
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Haha, I guess we'll see. I'm prepared to take one for the team here. They are rated for 4k in trifire, I did see a review where they performed rather well. Although I can't remember where I saw it atm.
 
Bal3W0lf said:
im not sure they will do 4k with gaming devs' lackluster crossfire/SLI support as of late.
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FTFY dawgslice

Also, they'll run 4k just fine in everything, just maybe not at max settings always. Even a single 295X2 will sadly, with everything being a console port nowadays.
 
Atarax said:
Wow, thanks for all the replies guys.
I have all the GPUs and got nearly all of them for less than $100 with water blocks. They will be water cooled with aquacomputer blocks & the SLI connector.
I already have a corsair ax1500w that I got for peanuts.
I will have a core x71 full tower.
The reason I'm going with 3x 290s is that they have drastically dropped in price and I'm looking to upgrade my rig to 4K standard on a budget.
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Unless you already have the rads and case, I would reconsider. If you want to use only two radiators (and I would want to because I dislike tubing) the most you can have is 7*120. That's not enough. Conventional wisdom would be 6 * 120 for the GPUs (at least) plus 2 * 120 for the CPU, I recommended 4 * 180 (two 2 * 180 rads) which equals 9 * 120 which is about enough. If you go with the X71 you'll need three rads, if you go with larger TT Core cases you can use 180mm rads.

Or the Phanteks Enthoo Primo can support 2 * 480 rads which is ... enough. Not plenty, but enough. More expensive, tho.
 
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Im fine with more than two rads, anyways, the 420 and 480+ rads tend to cost exponentially more.
I would would rather have 2*360, and a 280.
 
Atarax said:
Im fine with more than two rads, anyways, the 420 and 480+ rads tend to cost exponentially more.
I would would rather have 2*360, and a 280.
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OP, a little off topic, but would you happen to live in Florida in a city close to Miami?
 
Well if you are set on doing it I say go for it. But from experience running 2x 290x's was brutal, granted on air but alas it was pretty quick where it worked. I did have 4x at one point during the mining craze but that was a combo 1200w and 1000w ps to power that beast and the 15A circuit would like to have blown in the house ;). Probably your best bet is going to be an x99 platform board where I think the lower model cpu's with 28 lanes will let you do 8 x 8 x 8 on your lanes but check the board's specs to make sure. If you are wanting 16x across the board (not sure on the actual gains in performance) you will have to step up to the next tier of cpu with 40 lanes. I suppose you could do 2011-v1 or 2011-v3, but I donno if it is worth dropping a pile of cash on an old board or not.
 
Intel LGA 2011 CPU x99 should do it. I would suggest Asrock Extreme4 x99 because i have one setup with 3 R390x. There is a bigger concern i would think about and that is heat. R390x produces enormous amount of heat and havin 3 Fire setup working in games like Crysis 3 is going to hit 94C quickly on them. You better plan to watercool all three of them.
 
Luka said:
Intel LGA 2011 CPU x99 should do it. I would suggest Asrock Extreme4 x99 because i have one setup with 3 R390x. There is a bigger concern i would think about and that is heat. R390x produces enormous amount of heat and havin 3 Fire setup working in games like Crysis 3 is going to hit 94C quickly on them. You better plan to watercool all three of them.
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They're all going to be water cooled, so I'm not very worried on the heat end of things.
 
Probably not the most logical of builds but it sounds like it should be a fun and interesting project. I've had a pretty great experience with nVIDIA SLI for the past couple years. Previously I had an AMD CrossFire set and it seemed like things always ran worse with two cards than one. With SLI, it works most of the time in games I play, and when a game doesn't support it I don't see any adverse impact. If you're doing this for practicality I wouldn't recommend CrossFire, especially with 3 cards.
 
bjornb17 said:
Probably not the most logical of builds but it sounds like it should be a fun and interesting project. I've had a pretty great experience with nVIDIA SLI for the past couple years. Previously I had an AMD CrossFire set and it seemed like things always ran worse with two cards than one. With SLI, it works most of the time in games I play, and when a game doesn't support it I don't see any adverse impact. If you're doing this for practicality I wouldn't recommend CrossFire, especially with 3 cards.
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Running 2 way crossfire as is and haven't run into many problems, still stock coolers so some thermal throttling. 3 way will come with water cooling.
 
Atarax said:
Running 2 way crossfire as is and haven't run into many problems, still stock coolers so some thermal throttling. 3 way will come with water cooling.
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Cool, well post pics and report back when you're done. I just sold off my last 290 in the FS forum a few minutes ago so that is an end of the AMD era for me, at least for now, lol.
 
Atarax said:
They're all going to be water cooled, so I'm not very worried on the heat end of things.
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You should be. I couldn't even stand sitting in the same room as one 290X. I don't think I care to imagine what three would be like. Keep in mind that water cooling makes the cards more efficient at dumping heat into the room.

It'll be a wicked looking build, though. Pretty much any X99 board should work. I'd probably go with the ASRock Taichi, if I were buying today, but I like the MSI X99A-Gaming-7 I'm running in my main rig. I'd avoid Gigabyte. I also have their entry level offering, and while the hardware is very nice, it has the worst BIOS I've ever seen.
 
Haha dual 290x's in my office in the summer made me want to upgrade to a single 980ti, well those and dual E5 2687ws. But it was wicked fast.
 
RazorWind said:
You should be. I couldn't even stand sitting in the same room as one 290X. I don't think I care to imagine what three would be like. Keep in mind that water cooling makes the cards more efficient at dumping heat into the room.

It'll be a wicked looking build, though. Pretty much any X99 board should work. I'd probably go with the ASRock Taichi, if I were buying today, but I like the MSI X99A-Gaming-7 I'm running in my main rig. I'd avoid Gigabyte. I also have their entry level offering, and while the hardware is very nice, it has the worst BIOS I've ever seen.
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I'll be sure to keep you all updated on my journey into madness. :p
 
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