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Crossfired Radeon 6770 = ?
I did a PC build and used a 6770. I regret not investing money in a slightly more powerful card, but now I've got to work with what I've got. My ultimate goal is to be able to run GW2 at high/max settings, 1080p, with good/great fps. Additional specs for my system include 8 GB ram and a Phenom II x4 955 BE.
So, I have 2 options:
-Crossfire my existing 6770 with another 6770
-Try to eBay the 6770 for a few bucks and pick up a more powerful card
The first of the two would be much more convinient and less expensive. BUT, will two 6770's give me the performance I need? I couldn't really find on google regarding crossfiring this card aside from "it scales well". I'm also wondering if my 650W PSU (Antec, Bronze) will support the Crossfire option. Any insight you have to offer is appreciated. Thanks!
Comments
Those cards in crossfire are surprisingly powerful but it just depends on the game really. Mostly you'll get around GTX570 / AMD 6970 performance @1920x1080 though.
Your PSU will be fine but if you're overclocking your system you might need a bit more oomph.
From the vids and screenshots i ahve seen of GW it does not look that demanding but you never know it coul be quite un-opimised..
How much is an extra 6770? Crossfire will of course be awesome but the game needs to support it as well.
it might be worth saving that bit extra and getting a new card, I noticed the 7770s are out now not sure how they compare.. Check some reviews and stuff on the net..
I was using a 5770 xfire for over a year. not worth the trouble...
Firstly needed a power supply upgrade to make it "safe" (make sure you read up on xfire pwr requirements if u proceed with yours)
Then most of the mmorpgs did not scale much with crossfire. only giving a small to moderate increase in gfx performance.
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Thanks for the replys so far. If I even touched 6970 benchmarks with the 6770's I would be ecstatic. A 6770 can be had for $100 after rebate. Also, I'm not OCing at the moment as I've never really seen a need for it...but I'm becoming increasingly more interested in computers and will probably give it a go pretty soon (unless it means buying a new PSU). I checked out the 7770 and it appears to be MUCH better than the 6770. Damn my impulsive newegg purchases! I guess I could sell the 6770 for a minimum $50-$80, so it wouldn't be a huge loss. It's such a hassle, though. If Crossfiring the 6770's could put me near a 570 or 6970 I'd be all over that. Also, I read that GW2 will offer support for Crossfire/SLI.
Here is a helpful page with charts: http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/
And no, it is not worth it. The card is ancient and 2 ancient cards wont get close to a modern card.
Besides, MMOs have a tendency to do bad in SLI if they even supports it. Get a single good card instead.
And yeah, it is annoying to find out that your card is only good as a doorstop but don't plow down more money into that.
Besides, nvidia is just about to release the 680 GTX and that should shake up things a bit, even if you want a ati card that still might affect the prices.
Check out this review of 6770 in crossfire..
http://www.guru3d.com/article/his-radeon-6770-iceqx-turbo-crossfire-review/1
Looks like they cope pretty well..
I currently run 2x 6850s on a similar spec power supply to you and have no issues at all... Most decent games these days support crossfire and sli but even games that dont officially support it usually get a nice boost.
It's frustrating as hell to get answers pointing to opposite ends of the spectrum. Money is a huge limitation for me right now--If I were to sell my single 6770 the best I could replace it with would be a 560 ti from MSI (about $210).
Then the best option is to wait and save some more money instead. It is not like GW2 will release next month anyways.
Both the 560 and the SLI option is somewhat under what you want if you want to max out the game.
Besides, the 570 GTX will most likely drop in price when the 680 releases. just play cool a little while. Maybe you can get a second hand 480 (or 580) instead from from some buddy that will get the 680 when it releases.
With that budget i'd probably just save a little more and grab a 7850 @ $249 unless the 560ti you're seeing is a 448 version. The 7850 would work out cheaper over time though as it uses hardly any power and produces very little heat.
6770's are fantastic in crossfire but they won't be in every single game.
@Loke the 680's have been out for a week now
*Mumbles* Why do we allways get stuff later here? I checked an hour ago and my store said they hoped for next week.
I suppose you're right--I just need to wait and see. Maybe GW2 will scale phenomenally with xfire and that'll suffice--or maybe it won't cater to it at all. I suppose this thread is just another way to kill time while I await the game's release :P. Damn, I hate that my card is so meh. Oh well...just a classic mistake from a first build, I suppose.
I'd advise against CrossFire with 6770s. Even when everything works right, it's not going to be even as good as a single Radeon HD 6870 that costs maybe $170. And it's not going to come anywhere near a Radeon HD 6970, which is a lot more than twice as fast as a single 6770. Don't be deceived by average frame rate benchmarks, as they greatly overestimate how good of a gaming experience CrossFire and SLI setups give.
Also, it's likely that CrossFire isn't even an option for you. Unless you spend extra on a motherboard, power supply, and case that can handle a CrossFire setup, you can't add a second card and have it work safely. The extra ~$100 or so that it takes to properly accommodate CrossFire or SLI setups is completely wasted if you go with a single card, too. And that's a price gap if you're still buying everything new and saying, I'll pay more for this part instead of that one. If you're replacing old parts, it's much, much worse.
Released is not the same as being in stock. Nvidia could have delayed the launch by a month to get time to stockpile cards and do a proper hard launch. But they were getting completely slaughtered by AMD, and that would be a month of watching AMD sell a bunch more high end cards. Nvidia had something good to show with the GTX 680, so they decided to go with a soft launch to sell a handful of cards now to people who would have otherwise bought AMD, and also persuade some gamers to wait a bit and get an Nvidia card instead of grabbing an AMD card now.
The Osbourne effect of talking about your next generation killing sales of your current one is a lot weaker if your competitor's next generation is already out and killing sales of your current one.
This is one of those times when you give too much info Quizz.
@Quiz
I don't claim to be an expert regarding this sort of thing; but how can you say that CF doesn't work as well as the statistics indicate? Surely they work that well in those games at least. Or are you saying that the charts on that review are BS in general? Also, all my other hardware is ready for a 2nd 6770. Maybe I'm trying to justify the more convinient and inexpensive option in my own head...but regardless, I don't see any evidence that 6770's using CF is a bad thing. Could you please elaborate a little more?
personally i would just wait until the game releases see how well your pc holds up with and then upgrade if needed thats what im doing just saying
My two cents:
I just took out one of my crossfired 6970's as the performance wasn't all that "spectacular". In fact, the only game I actually saw awesome performance in was Battlefield 3 - and I'd get an average of 90-100+fps. Everything else however, ran slightly better with crossfire disabled.
The thing with crossfire is this - if there isn't a specific CAP (Crossfire Application Profile) for the game, the crossfired cards won't scale and you'll end up getting terrible performance / artifacts. And that's just one issue you can have...
Another fun scenario - There are CAP drivers for Saints Row the Third, and yet I'd still get 15+ more fps with crossfire disabled.
I'd suggest avoiding the headache having crossfired cards can (and probably will) give you and stick to a nice single-card setup.
I recommend against Crossfire.
Crossfire (and SLI) are niche - sure they work with lower cards, but it isn't to any benefit really (unless you get the second card for free). It's intended for
a) marketing purposes
b) for those few people that the single fastest card isn't fast enough
Crossfire profiles are game-to-game, it may work well in one, not so well in another, and actually be a negative in a third. So it's not a guaranteed performance increase. A single faster card is.
It will be louder, and take more power, than a single card that provides equal performance.
It takes up 2 PCI slots (not such a huge deal anymore, as most people just use PCI for video nowadays)
First off, if GW2 is your concern: it's not out yet.
Let me say that again. It isn't released yet. Heck, it isn't even out of NDA yet. Even if you are in Beta, the release (and more specifically, the first big patch to fix all the release problems) can greatly change the performance from the Beta.
Wait until the game is out before you do anything. It may run fine on what you have now (and ArenaNet is good at making graphics look good without requiring high end hardware).
There is the off chance you don't like the game at all, or that the actual product doesn't match the hype (*cough* FFXIV).
There is the very high likelihood of there being new hardware available (new nVidia cards, Ivy Bridge, etc) that could shake up the current hardware scene.
And once it's released, we may see that GW2 in particular prefers certain cards over others (it's CPU-intensive, so upgrading your PhenomII may be a better investment, it prefers nVidia over AMD, etc - all just examples here).
The 6770 is an older card, but it's not horrible. 1080p may stretch it a bit, but I would definitely wait until the game is out, then come back and ask this same question. Worst case is you play it for a week or two on medium settings, which isn't an offense worthy of slitting one's wrists over.
The basic problem is that average frame rates don't tell the whole story. Let's demonstrate with an extreme example. Suppose that you have two different video cards and play the same game at the same settings with both cards. Card A renders a new frame every 20 ms exactly. That gets you a smooth 50 frames per second, which is pretty good.
Card B, on the other hand, does nothing for half a second, then renders a new frame every 5 ms for the next half second, then does nothing for half a second, then a new frame every 5 ms for the next half second, and so forth. Card B thus renders 100 frames every second. If all you look at is average frame rates, then card B is 100 frames per second, while card A is 50 frames per second. So card B wins, right?
Except that back in the real world, card A runs the game smoothly. Card B makes the game pretty much unplayable unless it has a very slow pace. Card A wins this battle in a landslide. But average frame rates won't tell you that. Card B in this example is an extreme case, but it's not hard to imagine much milder examples where card B gives you the higher average frame rate, but card A gives you a better real-world experience. For complicated reasons, situations where a single card gives you lower average frame rates but a better real-world gameplay experience than a CrossFire/SLI setup are abundant, but the other way around virtually never happens.
If you want a couple of articles to read to understand why CrossFire and SLI aren't as good, then try these:
http://techreport.com/articles.x/21516/1
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/radeon-geforce-stutter-crossfire,2995.html
Those give some real measurements with real cards in real games--and in situations where CrossFire and SLI do work pretty well. Don't try to extrapolate too far into CrossFire is this versus SLI is that. The precise nature of the problems that CrossFire and SLI cause are pretty similar, but the details can vary a lot from game to game or from card to card.
Those also don't wander into frame rate latency, which is another theoretical problem for CrossFire and SLI setups. Imagine that card A and card B both render the same game at exactly the same frame rate, and perfectly smoothly. Card A displays every frame as soon as it is done. Card B delays by half of a second before displaying each frame. To someone standing next to you watching, they'll both look equally smooth. To someone sitting there playing the game, however, card B makes the game completely unplayable.
Frame rate latency is very difficult to measure, which is why I've never seen a tech article try to do so. For an explanation of why CrossFire and SLI intrinsically have to have frame rate latency problems, read the first half of this post:
http://forums.champions-online.com/showpost.php?p=1494672&postcount=3
That's me on a different forum. The cards in the example are from two generations ago, but the technology hasn't fundamentally changed since then.