UPGRADING P35 MOBO FOR CROSSFIRE

pogcica

I bought a 2nd HD4870 graphic card(got it cheap)

Is crossfire any use on my GA-P35-DS4 or is it worth getting a P45 board considering im using an OEM copy of VISTA so would also need a new OS.

I believe my mobo has 16x on the first PCIE x16
and 4x on the second

playing Crysis,Crysis Warhead,Fallout 3,Farcry 2 at the moment these being the newest i have.

Build details in my SIG.

Rgds D

farna_boy

To be honest I'm not actually sure what to recommend. The simple answer to the question "would a crossfire setup under P45 be better than a P35 setup?" the answer is definately yes. Toms hardware did an article on this back in 2008 found here and it showed that. Anyway running a crossfire setup on a x8/x8 would be better than x16/x4.
Is it worth buying a new P45 board for this? I doubt it. If you wanted to get a good P45 board, you would probably be looking at about €100+ and then you need a new OS as well.
I would say you're best bet would be to sell both the 4870's on say adverts where you might get up to €100 each and then maybe buy a 5850. The thing to note though is that a P35 board only runs on PCI-E 1.1 (as far as I remember) which is roughly equivalent to a x8 PCI-E 2.0. That should not be too much of a problem in reality though considering the worst performance you would probably see from this is a 2% reduction of performance at 2500x1600

pogcica

Thanks for your toughts farna_boy

I need a bridge connector so when it arrives i think i'll do some benchmarks with one card then two

I am very happy with my original 4870 and have had no problems running games on high settings and the motherboard has served me well giving no problems and good for overclocking.I am running my Q6600 @ 3.2GHz well over a year now