To crossfire or not to crossfire, that is the question!

Agricola1

I've never tried SLI or crossfire or any voodoo (no pun intended!) like that, so I thought I'd ask before I do give it a whirl. I'm building a gaming rig that should be ready in a few months. I'm going to get a crossfire compatible board with two pcie x16 slots, I'm just wondering if it's worth it.

Considering the prices of hd 4870 cards I thought why not buy two hd4850's and crossfire them? I save alot of money but do I get a significant increase in performance that would warrant it?

I realized I couldn't afford a hd4870x2 (I cried for hours!) and a good hd4870 is more than twice the price of two HD4850's. The hd4870's are running DDR3 or higher and the hd4850's are on DDR2.

My setup is starting to look like this,

CPU: Phenom ii x3 720 BE (AM3)

Mobo: Gigabyte GA-MA790FXT-UD5P

OS: Vista 64 bit (haven't looked really ATM)

RAM: 4 GB DDR3 (to start with)

GPU: Two hd4850's crossfired. Memory will probably be 512MB on each, DDR2.

Soundcard: I think a creative xi-fi of some sort or whatever the next step up from audigy is.

So any advice on crossfiring or would I need to change any of my planned system?

 

EDIT: I meant hd4650 instead of hd4850's, but if a 4850 performs that well I may go for it.

Cleffy

Crossfire/SLI isn't necessary.  An HD4850 can play every single game on their highest settings except crisis.  Using 2 gives a negligble increase.  Also only about 100 games offer any sort of difference with dual-GPU setups, ones that don't come with a performance hit or some functions not properly working.  I would say get 1-HD4850 if you don't want to spend money on an HD4890.

Also DDR3 isn't necessary.  Its similiar to DDR2 when it was released.  Cool to have but the motherboards out right now don't make use of it.  You would be better off getting an AM2+ board with a Deneb core processor.

jagd1

Is this agricola from DF   forum     ? Joking aside  AMD made a price discount to 4850 and 4870 cards just price gap between 1Gb models and 512Mb models around 50$-60$ for 4870  www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx  .iirc   4870x2 has only 1Gb *2 =2Gb total memory  model  but sapphire 4850x2  has both memory variants (1gb *2 or 512mb *2)

 

www.xbitlabs.com/articles/video/display/his-hd4870x2_6.html take a look to tests buy my opinion is  4870  512mb is best bang for buck  atm you can buy another later and crossfire .Btw 4870s using ddr5 rams ,4850s ddr3

 

Sound card : X-fi gamer or x-fi Titanium   or  up (Dont buy audio models ,they dont have eax 5.0 and actually they have not got x-fi chips ) my personal opinion x-fi titanium much better input -output options if youll not go more expensive models

astrob0y

Dont buy anything from Creative. Go to their forum and see what is going on there. Buy a sound card from Asus if you want a boost in your sound system. And I would suggest that you go for two 4850 cards becuse of the price and that you wont gain any fps increase with the more expensive 4870. That if you are planing to only mmorpg