Quad CrossfireX 5870 w 4 way EVGA board.

J

Jcazz

Limp Gawd
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Dec 10, 2009
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Guys, does this system setup work well or not? i need to know as a freind of mine might want me to put together this system and add a 4th card using a 4way board.....does it work ok in some games..if any...thx
 
Jcazz said:
Guys, does this system setup work well or not? i need to know as a freind of mine might want me to put together this system and add a 4th card using a 4way board.....does it work ok in some games..if any...thx
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I haven't seen ANYTHING- other than synthetics- that scales well with 4 GPUs. 3 seems to be the magic number (and honestly, in some games, even that is a very lopsided "performance vs. dollar" ratio.)

I just traded my 5970 for 2 Matrix ROG 5870s, and haven't seen enough of a reason to add a third. (and trust me, I wanted to - I LOVE excess - but to drop another 4-500 bucks for 5 FPS, even I am not THAT loony... :D )
 
Scaling after the 3rd GPU is usually very low. Thats not to say there isn't any benifit, there is sometimes, but its usually very low.
 
Scaling has come a long way, especially with ATI now releasing separate crossfire application profiles.

But really it's easy enough to look up benchmarks of the games that you play and see for yourself how they scale.

The games that don't scale at all are now a very small minority. Most games will have decent to good scaling. Some (mostly newer games) have exceptional scaling, such as Bad Company 2.
 
ok, well i am talking about running high res here guys. 1920x1080 up....high AA..supersample....high AF....V-sync...ect..i have found that 3 video cards (5870) seem to scale very well in terms of keeping frames up and strong when running these more custom options and fancy eye candy goodness. but at a cost....getting the cpu up in speed is the problem...i have found that a core I7 920 @ 4.1ghz is barley tapping the third cards potential...Once you have brought the clock speed to around 4.4+ and high QPI seeds...things start to change quickly.

but 4 cards require alot....i have the psu for it...ultra 1600x3...but i would need the correct motherboard to take advantage of it the most...i figure i am this close..might as well finish off the ultimate crazy i dont care build...So what else can anyone come up with then..
 
If you build such a beast do share the photos of your build. Would love to see it!
 
Silverghost said:
What website did the 3-way scaling review. 3x5770 did very well.
Click to expand...

Here: http://www.hardware.info/nl-NL/articles/amdnampoZGCa/Clash_of_the_Titans_3way_SLI_GTX_480_test/13

Shows 3-way crossfire scaling is great. Pretty much shows if crossfire gives you 70% delta increase, a third card gives you 140% delta increase. Scaling of 1 vs 3 HD5870s ranged between 137% to 206% increase in FPS, with an average scaling of ~150%. Pretty insane considering 200% would be prefect scaling. 3-way HD5870 usually beat crossfire HD5970s (4 GPUs at lower clock speeds) and traded blows with 3-way SLI GTX480 depending on the game tested.

3-way SLI GTX480s scaling was good too, and averaged ~130% scaling over 1 card. 3xGTX480 was a little faster than the 3xHD5870 over all, but scaling was a little less than 3-way crossfire.

I have not seen any 4-way Crossfire or SLI tests other than Crossfire 5970s, but they seem to scale well enough, ~70%, which is what 2-way crossfire and SLI usually average. I would get 2GB version HD5870s for Quad-Crossfire since you probably have the GPU performance to push those ultra resolutions with AA and use over 1GB.
 
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