Should I go Crossfire?

[jamesrb]

I am currently running:

Phenom II 955
8GB DDR2
Radeon 4850 512MB


I game on my 52-inch TV at 1920x1080 and feel that the 4850 is starting to hold me back as far as gaming goes. It seems like I am having to turn down the settings slightly to keep consistent framerates on newer games, and the card has never handled Crysis well.

I have thought about adding a second 4850 in Crossfire but have never went with a multi-gpu setup before. Would I be better off getting a single 5770, Crossfire 5770's or just going for a 5870?

I like the thought of getting the second 4850 since it is cheap, but it seems like multi-gpu isn't really going to offer great improvements on all games, but only on games AMD optimizes.

 

[ShuttleLuv]

Ati and crysis has always been crap.

 

[Nenu]

Get at least a 5770 but I'm not so sure you should crossfire them unless you dont mind a few bugs.
I'm running 5770 Crossfire, its fantastic and very quick when it works.
But the drivers are shit at times as I have to reboot a few times a day if gaming a lot to keep crossfire working.
It always works fine immediately after boot but after running multiple gfx programs/games, crossfire can disable and wont re-enable, especially if a program terminates unexpectedly.
There are a few other issues with the driver but they arent show stoppers.

If you play for a few hours and turn your PC off, its unlikely to bother you but if like me your PC is on almost 24/7, you might have to do the same.
Stability improved a lot moving from 9.11 to 9.12 driver, so I have some hope that ATI will make good.

 

[digital_buzzard]

Hi.

I've recently received a pair of 4770s (XFX) as a gift and X-fired them. My config was as follows:

i7 920 (stock speed)
P6T DLX V.2
6GB PC1600
WD Caviar BLK 1TB (single drive)
HX850 PSU
WIN7 PRO

I have been running this rig with a EVGA SC GTX260-216 for about a year. Well, switching to 4770 X-fire, I did not see a performance increase that I had expected. I understand that the 260 and the 4770 is in the lower end of the GPU hierarchy and did not expect night/day difference by switching out the GPUs. As a matter of fact, I was even a bit disappointed. Therefore, I used Driver Cleaner from Guru3d and switched back to the 260.
What I liked about 4770 X-fire:
Easy Install - No need to install one card, install CCC, turn-off PC, install second card...etc. Both cards installed at the same time and after Catalyst install, X-fire recognized automatically.
Image Quality - Ever since 6600GT era, I've noticed ATI has a much deeper and richer colors at default in 2D/3D apps compared to nVidia. Same can be said with these 4770s config. But, I'm a n00b and that's just my opinion.
Dislikes:
Performance in games and 2D apps - I play older games when given the chance. Company of Heroes for example, I tried a comp stomp scenario with extra large maps with seven other opponents and the performance was a little bit stuttery when the 260 ran the same scenes smooth (x4 AA, High quality sets on all options).
Same was experienced with Fallout 3 (usually ATI friendly game) and ARMA1 could not even run (later realized the game did not support X-fire). GTA4 could not do high quality settings (4770s 512MB limit was just too much for eye candy) and the image quality was not up to par...although playable. Photo editing on Photoshop wasn't as quick as the 260 either....perhaps the patch on PS was a bit out dated?
Fan noise - It's really not that bad but, The case for the above set-up is in a HAF932 + 3 X-tra fans and when you hear both cards whirling every 5 seconds or so...it got a bit annoying. I've even re-seated the HSF with OCZ Freeze and Zalman RAM sinks as well.

By the way, I'm not much into the fanboy thing and I'm not trying to tear down ATI. I think there are good and bad in both ATI and nVidia.
I hope if you go ahead with a X-fire 4850s, that it will give you a better experience.

edit: ran the PC hooked up to a 24" LCD running 1920x1080

 

[foxlinked]

if you are curious about the gains from 4850cf, here are some of my benches

single card, heaven benchmark

crossfire

crossfire at 1920x1080

CoP bench single card

crossfire

i tried running the benchmark_gpu.bat in the crysis folder and got 25fps using natural mod at 1920x1080 but when crossfire was enabled, it would freeze right as it started every time.
I was just playing it the other night on the snow level after you get out of the cave and was getting from 20-50fps depending what was going on. it did seem pretty jittery at times.

getting another 4850 doesn't seem like such a bad idea if you can get one cheap enough.
otherwise, a 5870 would be pretty sweet... or you could wait for nvidia to come out with something so the prices drop.