7970 Crossfire on Socket 1366

[eyefinity]

Hey there! I'm new here and I guess I'll be here more often if ya nice Sry for my english, not native speaker!

Currently my rig consists of:

i7-950 @ 3,2GHz
GA-EX58-UD5
3072MB HIS Radeon HD 7970 IceQ X2 TURBO (1050MHz GPU/1400MHz RAM)
16Gig of 1333MHz Corsair (4 modules)
760Watt Seasonic X-Series PSU
3x1920*1200 Displays (Eyefinity)

Does someone of you have REAL experience about how much performance gain I would get with a second 7970 @ same clocks? Stock CPU


I once had a HD4890 Crossfire and i testet it with CPU OC and it made a lot of difference. Click images.



Question: Would my i7-950 bottleneck the Crossfire 7970 even @ 4GHz? Is it money (7970 currently 340€) worth spending or should i also upgrade the MoBo and CPU?

Thank you so much!

 

[Roooker]

At the time right now, it was just figured out that crossfire has got serious problems with stutter and visual smoothness. Many "runt" frames and inconstant frame times are not really great. Read more here.

I would not recommend crossfire at all right now.

Aside from that i dont think the 950 would hold back the horse power of the 2 gpus. Especially at 4 Ghz.

 

[NeverBackDown]

It would take 3way Xfire or SLI to completely max out your cpu. Maybe 2 titans

 

[airdeano]

welcome to the OC3D forums.

you hadn't mentioned what productivity or gaming you use to warrant CFX 7970.

as rooker mentioned the newer tech for CFX is having an over-load problem and
the platform builders are looking for correction.

the 775 platformers were looking for upgrades and the sandy/ivey was a great
upgrade from their older platform. the 1366 prolly has another 1-2yrs before
being over-powered on scaling and performance. but it really comes down to
necessity.. what you have now really isn't a problem or are there games/appz
(not listed) that might improve from a 2nd GPU? maybe.. information from you
would be what games/appz you have that are unplayable or very poor performers.

 

[MrKambo]

from someone running 7970 crossfire, i spend most of the time only running one card, because thats more than enough to play games @ 1080p

 

[eyefinity]

As you might have red: I play eyefinity with 6012*1200 res (tft-border-correction)

in crysis3, far cry 3, bioshock infinit i dont get max details with one card @ this res to be playable. i heard amd is working on an alpha driver which looks promising (but not released yet).

:-/ so you say crossfire currently doesnt make sense?

 

[NeverBackDown]

Only because they don't scale at all. Games will report that it is but its only because they are reproducing runt frames. I am not expert on this like AlienALX is but i'm sure he could explain.

 

[alienware]

Only because they don't scale at all. Games will report that it is but its only because they are reproducing runt frames. I am not expert on this like AlienALX is but i'm sure he could explain.

Yeah I've done a lot of studying and reading I have to admit. More than I'm totally comfortable with haha but I found it utterly intriguing !

Put briefly.

The issue is specific to Crossfire only.

It has gone undetected for so long because at a GPU core level the readings are incorrect. IE - runt frames and dropped frames are not distinguished by FRAPs, it reads all of them and shows them like you're getting them.

After exhaustive reading I can conclude that only around 50% of games work properly in Crossfire on the 7950 and 7970 in their related Crossfire mode. Lower end model cards (such as the 7870 and 7850) are even worse. You'd be lucky to get 40% of them working which is really odd given that games that worked on the higher end systems did not work on the lower end ones.

AMD are aware of this and are trying to fix it, but, this fabled alpha driver does not exist and hasn't been promised until, at the earliest, late summer.

AMD do not have hardware incorporated onto their cards like Nvidia do to prevent this. Future cards most likely will but none of the current cards do.

Of course you are free to make your own decisions and choices here, but spoken as a person who loves technology and just wants to see good things happening I would avoid Crossfire like the bubonic plague. It's so badly broken that you may as well put a dummy card in next to yours so you can see two video cards, as the second one will actually screw up your performance (causing micro stutter).

 

[NeverBackDown]

And there you go. A summary lol

 

[eyefinity]

Thx so far You saved me a lot of cash I'll just wait and see what the future brings concerning crossfire. so, maybe OC brings me more closer to good fps @ eyefinity? Far Cry 3 isnt really enjoyable @ this resolution.

 

[alienware]

Thx so far You saved me a lot of cash I'll just wait and see what the future brings concerning crossfire. so, maybe OC brings me more closer to good fps @ eyefinity? Far Cry 3 isnt really enjoyable @ this resolution.

670+ SLI and surround. You'll likely need 4gb cards though.

 

[eyefinity]

The green team is currently not an option but thanks!

 

[NeverBackDown]

670+ SLI and surround. You'll likely need 4gb cards though.

2gb is more than enough for me personally. I have never used more than 1500mb of vram in any game. But Nvidia may use memory differently so i wouldn't know

 

[BigDaddyKong]

I am running a 980X at 1600P. I was having trouble getting full GPU use out of both 7970's. I found that when I increased my ULK Frequency, I received at nice boost in performance.