single card Vs dual setup

newirishshogun

Radeon 5850 or 2 x Radeon HD 5770 in CrossFire cost pretty much the same but the dual cards give better scores. Any downside I'm not seeing?

uberpixie

newirishshogun wrote: »

Radeon 5850 or 2 x Radeon HD 5770 in CrossFire cost pretty much the same but the dual cards give better scores. Any downside I'm not seeing?

1) performance relies on drivers being up to date and games actually supporting crossfire.

Take Arma 2 for example: does not support SLI or crossfire in any way and on a x2 5770 setup you would only be using X1 5770 whereas you would get much better performance on a single 5850.....

2) microstutter: benchmarks may give nice numbers but as the game information is copied to both cards you can get situations where the cards go slightly out of synch and you get random visual slowdowns/lag in games, not enough to ruin benchmark scores but it is something that would drive some people insane playing a game.

3) Memory: as the information is copied to both cards, you only ever end up using half the available ram, x2 1gig cards in sli/crossfire only use 1 gig on memory. This is why 1gig or even 2 gig cards a very important for crossfire and SLI setups at the high end playing on crazy resolutions.


x1 good card: performance will be roughly the same in all games.
x2 ok cards: performance may or may not be good depending on the game and you rely a lot more on driver support.

Personally: stick with one good card, less to go wrong.:pac: (unless you can get the 2nd card cheap then why the hell not)

newirishshogun

Thanks Uberpixie, talk about a perfect reply! The 5850 it is then

PogMoThoin

uberpixie wrote: »

1)

Take Arma 2 for example: does not support SLI or crossfire in any way and on a x2 5770 setup you would only be using X1 5770 whereas you would get much better performance on a single 5850.....

Yes it does, I've got crossfire, it performs a little better in crossfire than when on a single card. Bad example. It could be optimised better but crossfire does work.

Crossfire isn't worth it though. You get very little extra performance for that extra gpu. My next card will be a single gpu

uberpixie

PogMoThoin wrote: »

Yes it does, I've got crossfire, it performs a little better in crossfire than when on a single card. Bad example. It could be optimised better but crossfire does work.

Crossfire isn't worth it though. You get very little extra performance for that extra gpu. My next card will be a single gpu

As boards resident Arma2aholic I will take your word for it! :pac:

The last I had read on ARMA2 and crossfire support was in the days of the 4870x2 Vs the 4890 where the 4890 was the better option as it was the faster single gpu .