Hey [H].
I have spent the past hour and a half googling to my hearts content, but I can not get a straight answer on this question. All the answers I have seen related to the 4000 series of graphic cards and unless the PCI-E bandwidth needs of the 5000 are near the same then I haven't found an answer to my question.
I want to add a second 5870 card for Crossfire, but doing so would put all my true x16 slots at x8 and I am afraid that this will be more of a bottleneck in crossfire then it would be worth it performance upgrade wise.
Currently I am circumventing the x8 issue on my 5870 by the organization of my cards. With my motherboard, the top and 3rd x16 slots run at x16 as long as the second or fourth x16 slots do not have any cards in them.
So my 5870 is in my third slot running at x16 while my 9800 GT (for Physx) and my SAS controller card are in the first and second slots with only x8 available to them.
For reference:
This is my motherboard: NewEgg Link Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD5.
This is a picture of my current setup:
In order from top to bottom:
First Slot: 9800 GT (Physx)
Second Slot: SAS Controller Card (it is a x4 card)
Third Slot: Radeon 5870
Fourth Slot: Open
Basically if the bottleneck is as low as single % numbers then I will still need to find a solution to the need for extra space, but right now I am trying to see if it is even worth going through all that trouble at this point.
Thanks in advance for any advice given.
I have spent the past hour and a half googling to my hearts content, but I can not get a straight answer on this question. All the answers I have seen related to the 4000 series of graphic cards and unless the PCI-E bandwidth needs of the 5000 are near the same then I haven't found an answer to my question.
I want to add a second 5870 card for Crossfire, but doing so would put all my true x16 slots at x8 and I am afraid that this will be more of a bottleneck in crossfire then it would be worth it performance upgrade wise.
Currently I am circumventing the x8 issue on my 5870 by the organization of my cards. With my motherboard, the top and 3rd x16 slots run at x16 as long as the second or fourth x16 slots do not have any cards in them.
So my 5870 is in my third slot running at x16 while my 9800 GT (for Physx) and my SAS controller card are in the first and second slots with only x8 available to them.
For reference:
This is my motherboard: NewEgg Link Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD5.
This is a picture of my current setup:
In order from top to bottom:
First Slot: 9800 GT (Physx)
Second Slot: SAS Controller Card (it is a x4 card)
Third Slot: Radeon 5870
Fourth Slot: Open
Basically if the bottleneck is as low as single % numbers then I will still need to find a solution to the need for extra space, but right now I am trying to see if it is even worth going through all that trouble at this point.
Thanks in advance for any advice given.