[1080jibber]

as the title says, is it worth it to go Crossfire or SLI?
it seems like a lot of money for 2 video cards, is the performance that much better.

im a Crossfire and SLI noob, any specs between having Crossfire or SLI and the latest top end single ATI or Nvidia would be awsome.

[ninty]

I think you could probably run most games today near max res with 1 card.

I picked up an x1950 pro AGP (yes i'm still using AGP) and could play oblivion on near max everything. With some tweaks I could probably get there. BF2 and HL2 were both maxed and getting 50fps+.

I returned the card because theres a problem with the heatsink on the VRM i believe causing the card to freeze up at some points. Other people are having this problem too. Also, I returned it because I could run games, but I didn't feel comfortable with my 430W PSU and only 20A on the 12V+ rail hooked up with everything else. The card requires 2 molex power connectors!

So i went back to my x800 pro. can still play pretty much everything on medium quality which is fine.

Next rig I will probably do a crossfire setup, but I won't purchase the second card. if I find that I need some more power, slap another card in there and should be good to go...although next setup will probably be dx10 so may need to wait a while for prices to drop, depending on where they are since ati cards aren't out yet.

I hope this answer is sufficient 5 months later. happy:

[geRV]

Never even noticed this thread. oOo:

Crossfire and sli work well in some games and not as well in others. When you go the dual card route you have to make sure you've a monitor capable of outputting a high res (1600x1200 and higher) make sure you have a good wattage psu 550 - 600+. Also a good cpu is needed, no real point in having a 2.2ghz cpu or something as it'll be more of a bottleneck to the 2 cards. Realistically theres not a cpu out there yet that can provide enough cpu time to make 2 cards run at their fastest but the faster the cpu the better.

Crossfire and sli offer more options in terms of anti aliasing, single ati card max fsa is 6x, with crossfire its 14x

[img]http://homepage.ntlworld.com/gerald.marley/radeon/ccc.jpg[/img]


Some games do react pretty oddly to multi card configs, i remember benchmarking doom 3 with 1 card, then with crossfire enabled and the crossfire setup was slower than the single card by 1fps. oOo:

In dod source i get the following:

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/gerald.mar ... e-card.jpg (1 card 6x fsaa 16x hq aniso)

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/gerald.mar ... fire-1.jpg (2 cards 6x fsaa 16x hq aniso catalyst ai set to default)

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/gerald.mar ... fire-2.jpg (2 cards 6x fsaa 16x hq aniso, with catalyst ai set to full)


Im running vista 64bit now so results are probably a little better than they were with xp. Dunno if id go the dual card route again, there are obvious improvements in fps and iq but not really enough to warrant the price of a second card imo.