Crossfire question

[MixedNuts]

Hey guys I do mostly gaming and websurfing type of stuff. Would running 2 HD5770's in Crossfire benefit me at all?
Everything runs fine but I love to tinker and would like see some decent results.
What do you guys think?

[AMDScooter]

Hey guys I do mostly gaming and websurfing type of stuff. Would running 2 HD5770's in Crossfire benefit me at all?
Everything runs fine but I love to tinker and would like see some decent results.
What do you guys think?

If your current setup offers good performance at whatever resolution you play at why add cost? The 5770 is a great lil card and I built a coupe of systems for my nephews with them last Christmas. They pushed pixels to their 22" LCD's ok at "decent to low" quality settings depending on the game. Then again if you like to tinker.. have a few $$ laying about and can pick one up on the cheap(I've seen them sub $100 retail a few places lately) why not? The only other factor I'd think about is the option to simply off your current 5770 combine the sales proceeds with the extra $$ you'd have spent on a second 5770 and simply upgrade to a faster single slot card. Sure is a lot easier to manage as far as setup (not that xfire is hard to set up.. but you do have to factor it in)space, heat and power requirements when dealing with 2 GPU's in the same box. Hope this helps...

My2c.

[Poci]

I had 2x 5770s. Was a pain in the ass.
Your better off getting a single more powerfull card.

I got a 5870 and have no complaints.

Only reason I would recommend crossfire is with something like 2x 6970s.

[MixedNuts]

Sounds good guys thanks for the input. I think I'll just go for a single faster card.

[Poci]

Newegg has a great deal on an XFX 5870 for like 170 bucks.

Such a great deal I was thinkning of ordering 5 and reselling them, here in europe the 5870s are all almost 400 dollars in price

[oldbrave]

I.m running two 5870's and it was a complete no brainer to set up and no more maintenance than a single card. I guess it all depends on if your PSU can support two cards.
Damn $170 for a 5870, I'm wondering what is wrong with them cause most 5870's go for $300 or better.

[Poci]

I.m running two 5870's and it was a complete no brainer to set up and no more maintenance than a single card. I guess it all depends on if your PSU can support two cards.
Damn $170 for a 5870, I'm wondering what is wrong with them cause most 5870's go for $300 or better.

Yes they certianly seem like a no brainer. But I can assure you that even with adequate power I was still having problems, like some games actually performed worse with crossfire on and some saw no benefits at all. Prolly immature drivers when I did crossfire maybe its diferent now.

[Nightowl224]

Yes they certianly seem like a no brainer. But I can assure you that even with adequate power I was still having problems, like some games actually performed worse with crossfire on and some saw no benefits at all. Prolly immature drivers when I did crossfire maybe its diferent now.

I'm running two factory overclocked Visiontek Radeon 4870's in Crossfire, using Catalyst 10.12 and no problems in Crossfire.

I can tell you this, in the early days of Crossfire there were problems with Crossfire, due to drivers and the early implementation required you to use an external Crossfire cable to link two Radeon's together such as the X850 cards, X1800's, and the X1900 series. It was when the 2900 series cards came out, that ATI finally reached generation 2 for Crossfire and went to an internal Crossfire bridge, like Nvidia had done with SLI on their cards.

And yes, if you are wondering, I had a pair of X1800's, one card had to be rmaed twice and back then Crossfire didn't work the way it does now, and I did notice that some games did not work the greatest with Crossfire.

[AMDScooter]

Nv had a good head start having had bought out 3xfx... ya I wept a little. ATi had to start from scratch but their xfire scaling has come a long way. I'd say their implementation now is every bit as good as NV.

I still remember pre Radeon how I used to hope they would have decent drivers when their new hardware released... and how it never happened. Giving their high end lineup at the time the "Rage" name was quite appropriate. Most people who bought their products felt a lot of it when trying to get their drivers to work.

[Pehu]

Nv had a good head start having had bought out 3xfx... ya I wept a little. ATi had to start from scratch but their xfire scaling has come a long way. I'd say their implementation now is every bit as good as NV.

I still remember pre Radeon how I used to hope they would have decent drivers when their new hardware released... and how it never happened. Giving their high end lineup at the time the "Rage" name was quite appropriate. Most people who bought their products felt a lot of it when trying to get their drivers to work.

The driver part is certainly true, but Ati actually had a dual GPU solution (Rage Maxx, I think it was) released about a year before nVidia acquired most of 3dFx. It should also be noted that some sources state that a lot of employees left 3DFx at the time and many actually joined Ati and are probably behind Ati's Crossfire-solution.

[Poci]

I'm running two factory overclocked Visiontek Radeon 4870's in Crossfire, using Catalyst 10.12 and no problems in Crossfire.

I can tell you this, in the early days of Crossfire there were problems with Crossfire, due to drivers and the early implementation required you to use an external Crossfire cable to link two Radeon's together such as the X850 cards, X1800's, and the X1900 series. It was when the 2900 series cards came out, that ATI finally reached generation 2 for Crossfire and went to an internal Crossfire bridge, like Nvidia had done with SLI on their cards.

And yes, if you are wondering, I had a pair of X1800's, one card had to be rmaed twice and back then Crossfire didn't work the way it does now, and I did notice that some games did not work the greatest with Crossfire.

Yeah but I got my dual 5770s when they were realeased. Drivers were immature, maybe not for your 4870s but for the 5xxx series they were

[Nightowl224]

Yeah but I got my dual 5770s when they were realeased. Drivers were immature, maybe not for your 4870s but for the 5xxx series they were

I had a pair of Sapphire Radeon 3870's before this in Crossfire, each card had to be rmaed once. Then on top of this, I had driver problems with the cards in Crossfire. Running one card was fine, but in Crossfire some games like Mass Effect 2 had glitches.

The problems with the Sapphire cards, soured me on Sapphire cards. Sadly when one buys cards at launch, the drivers aren't quite up to snuff. Case and point take the Nvidia GTX 590 dual gpu card, the very first set of drivers for it, cause the card to overheat and essentially burn up when the card is overclocked. This is all over the net, and I'm sure there are some problems with the drivers for the Radeon 6990.

I used to buy cards right away when they come out, but not anymore.

I'm assuming the drivers for the 5000 series cards, should be pretty decent now. The 6000 series cards from what I've heard on various forums and the Bioware Forums for Dragon Age 2 have some bugs, one of which won't be fixed until Catalyst 11.4 comes out next month.

[HeavyG]

I had 2x 5770s. Was a pain in the ass.
Your better off getting a single more powerfull card.

I got a 5870 and have no complaints.

Only reason I would recommend crossfire is with something like 2x 6970s.

Not sure why 2 x 5770s would be different than 2 of any other card. CrossfireX is simple as long as you have a motherboard and PSU capable of supporting.

For browsing and such, you won't get much benefit unless you are looking to attach more than 3 monitors, but games will surely notice a difference.

Edit: And drivers have come a long way. I haven't had many problems with my 4850 Crossfire box in about 7 or 8 months.