crossfire and gpu question

[napier]

Hey all,

Had a few GPU questions if anyone could lend a hand. I was thinking about running a crossfire setup in my current rig. Right now I have a crossfire compatible motherboard, as well as a radeon 4850. I really like the 4850, but was wondering if I would see a huge improvement running another one? Also, if I run crossfire, does it have to be the same card, or maybe someone could recommend another card?

Also, right now the gpu runs at about 70-80c with a stock fan, i've read this is common with the 4850 so I was going to pick up a thermaltake duorb to place on it. I've got a thermaltake case and fan so airflow is great as well as my cpu temp, just my cards running a bit hot.

Another side question, im running 2g of crucial ballistix 1066 ram, I have 4g of ballistix 800 ram just sitting around. Would putting the slower 4g in run better than the faster 2g? Prob not, but I thought someone might have done some testing..

Anyways, thanks for the help, much appreciated!

napier

[Digger[NJLP]]

Welp, I think the large majority of us are using Nvidia GPUs so as to the performance gain I am not to sure.

I have two BFG 7900 GT OCs with 512 megs each and on an SLI capable board and the performance SLI'd to not SLI'd is dramatic for me. So yes atleast for my current config two cards are much better then one.

Heat is not an issue I have the stock fans on both and I haven't had any heat issues.

I can't see swapping out the faster ram for more slower ram unless your hitting the ceiling with your 2 gigs of fast ram. If you play games and you check your recources and you are swapping to the swap file all the time for not enough available RAM, then yes it will help. But if you are well with in your RAM size for your needs I can't see swapping out less/faster for more/slower.

[Gliese]

Hey Napier, as long as your motherboard supports crossfire, you will see an improvement from adding a second 4850 from any manufacturer. 2 things to consider first however: those cards do tend to run pretty hot, and 2 of them inside a case that is not well ventilated will cause problems from time to time. I would suggest adding an exhaust fan (PCI) type or whatever that can expell the hot air from the inside of your case after it has passed over the video card's cooling solution. The other thing is CPU bottleneck and the type of games being played. Some games do not scale well with crossfire, but do with nvidia's sli, and visa versa. If your cpu is on the slow side, you may not see the full benefits from adding a second GPU, but you will see some = ). As far as the memory is concerned, I would check the specs on your ballistix 800's as a lot of them are rated to run 1066 at slightly higher voltage. At 800mhz you won't see a speed increase necessarily, but you may find you can alt tab out of games you couldn't before, and recover a lot faster than with only 2g of the 1066. Hope this helps, and if you want any more help, I'll be there all weekend = )


-Gliese

[napier]

Great, thanks for the tips. Im currently running a phenom 9950 2.6 overclocked to 3.0. Ventalation and cooling seems to be great as during gaming the highest its ever gotten is about 39c.

I'm thinking about overclocking the 4850 slightly once I replace the stock fan, maybe this will give me a little improvement over purchasing another 4850? (Not sure, never OC'd a gpu before) I was looking around and it seems the 4850 not used much anymore? Seems hard to find a duplicate of my HIS one.

Anyway thx for the help.

napier

[napier]

just to update, I got a duorb for my 4850 and it works GREAT! It was typically running around 70-80c and now its down to 20's!! Ive been overclocking it and its still down in the 30s