Crossfire or no crossfire?

[Ashley Riches]

Hi guys im after a bit of help, i cant decide if i should get a larger single card or two smaller and crossfire those i want to run eyefinitly in the near future on 3x 24' monitors ive had a look on the web and read different opinions but most of these are based on FPS games i just want to hear about racing games and opinions for and against? My specs are

Currently use HD4550
Asus Crosshair III Formula AMD 790FX mobo
AMD Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition Socket
Corsair 4GB (2x2GB) DDR3 1333MHz Dominator Memory Kit

Thanks in advance

 

[Henry Muller]

crossfire is great but, it depends more on driver updates and profiles than a single card, so you potentially can have more problems, and sometimes performance scaling is not that great in every game....

also by buying now a faster single card, you can in the future add another of the same model, while if you go now with 2 cards that's probably not going to be possible, but what single and crossfire cards are you considering at the moment?

 

[Ashley Riches]

Thanks for your reply was thinking 2x 5770 or a single 5850 thanks

 

[Jim Cole]

If you have the money for the 2 5770's, then go for it. The performance of those 2 cards in crossfire are pretty amazing. Check out www.tomshardware.com/reviews/best-graphics-card,2964-7.html and you will see that the 5770 is near the top for a single card, so dual cards should net quite the improvement.

 

[Saul Boucher]

I'm running an HD 6990 which is single card but dual gpu in crossfire. I have no issues with it in crossfire and eyefinity, it runs great. Max settings 3 x 24".

In your case however since you are looking to run very high resolution in eyefinity, your limitation might be memory. Those cards have 1GB. I'm not sure, just saying it's something you may want to research first.

 

[Ashley Riches]

I'm running an HD 6990 which is single card but dual gpu in crossfire. I have no issues with it in crossfire and eyefinity, it runs great. Max settings 3 x 24".

In your case however since you are looking to run very high resolution in eyefinity, your limitation might be memory. Those cards have 1GB. I'm not sure, just saying it's something you may want to research first.

Hi there thanks for your reply, ive been looking on various websites youtube etc etc and so many people contradict one another its unreal and as a PC gaming noob its all very confusing so thought i would turn to the chaps on hear who use eyefinity for racing thats all i want it for not fps which ive read are apparently alot more demanding graphicly, i also watched (well i say watched moor drooled over a woman on there but thats a different story lol) a episode of something called insidesimracing on youtube and they had a eyefinity setup on there with a system very similar to mine which is where i got the idea from in the first place lol here is a link what do you think?

 

[Jim Cole]

The 6990 was ATI's flagship card and is very expensive for the performance. If you look at articles on tom's hardware you will see that you can do quite well with almost any of the cards at the 5750 and above performance level. Try and avoid the cards ending lower than the XX50 though as they don't do so well. You can do triple screen with a single 67XX card as long as you don't mind a couple of the graphics settings turned down in the game you are playing.

The only other thing I would do is be sure that you are running a 64bit OS so that you can run a decent amount of system ram as well as the ram on the graphics cards. If you don't you will be stuck using 2Gig on the cards and 1Gig of system ram. Not the best configuration in my opinion. If you go with a single graphics card, it will likely have 1Gig on it which would allow for 2Gig of system ram, but 1Gig won't be enough to power the triple monitors with decent graphics settings.

 

[Saul Boucher]

I wouldn't go with anything less than the 5850 with 3 x 24" monitors. The 5770 and other cards in that class are great for single monitor target resolutions around 1080p. Increase your resolution to 3 times that, different story.

In fact, for the price. Look to the 68xx series. Either the 6850, or the 6870 if you can. The 68xx series improved thermals and efficiency of the 58xx series, and the pricing doesn't look much different. You can pickup a 6870 in the US from Newegg for less than $200.

Also, the nice thing about Eyefinity is you don't need to run a dual GPU setup. You can do it with a single card.

Sounds like the 1GB should be enough memory, might not be able to run max texture res though.

 

[Jeremy Loveland]

why not get something like the HD6870 x 2 2GB?
its a single card with duel GPU so its as good as cross fireing a pair.
and only $499 AUD (not sure where ur from or where u would buy from, but here is a link to sed price)
http://www.pccasegear.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=17832