I've currently got a 6870. Decided i fancy a little more "grunt". Whats the better option, sell the 6870 and buy a 580 or buy a second 6870 and crossfire it up?
Case has quite good airflow. I don't go about overclocking things, so shouldn't be generated any additional heat. In terms of less hassle? Do you mean performance?
Why not try and find some benchmarks to see how the 6870 does in crossfire, and then see how the 580 does by itself.
no, hassle. think latest AAA games: Crysis 2, Assassins Creed Brotherhood. you can't play them with 2 cards at the moment, so you to go into control panel and disable multi-GPU every time you want to play. what is performance? it's overrated. review sites compare benchmarks to see which configuration has best performance, but no review site compares the frustration when it doesn't work. if you want to play new games on release, best to stick with single-GPU.
Yeah, that is what i was worried about. That SLI / Crossfire reviews only highlighted games which allow multi-GPU setups. It is common that any newly released games take a while before they become SLI / Crossfire enabled? If so, looks like 580 is the better bet.
you'd think 2 x cool cards = cool but, you'd be wrong We've found in CrossFire and SLI setups, both cards run much hotter due to their close proximity and the interferance they have on each other's cooling and airflow as a result. Often, the bottom card cuts off airflow to the top card, and the top card cooks. wuyanxu is spot on in pointing out that while SLI gives you nice big impressive benchmark numbers, it's reliance on drivers and living with it day-to-day is still a bugger. 580 = best choice in this situation
Now i've just got to figure out whether a 580 will fit in my Silverstone FT02, without having to remove one of the HDD bays. Thanks for the advice chaps
Crysis 2: screen flashing when there is smoke in the scene. AC Brotherhood: just doesn't work. both games are over 3 weeks old...... it depends on the game and your luck. that's why i won't be going multi-GPU until a proper system has been implemented. (eg. dedicated scheduler chip. think dual-GPU card that behaves and seen as a single GPU by the OS. but this will never happen because requires heavy R&D cost, yet return is only for a single ultra-high end product) edit: ninja'd by Baz and OP
That is of course all depending on your air flow in your case, and where you have your fans pointing. But anyhow, GTX 580!!
I remember when I had 2 x 4870's Always seemed to be one game that wouldn't work at any one given time. Nosey and very very hot. Wouldn't go back tbh.
Ok. Time for the guy who has 6870 crossfire to chip in. Can't comment on AC Brotherhood as I don't own it. Crysis 2 however I do have and I have it running in crossfire no problem. In fact it's better than no problem! It scales amazingly well using both GPU's at a constant 98-99%. I did have the flashing and not good scaling before I used the config file generator that Norwell@CCL linked in the comments on Crysis 2 PC review. Once I used that and ticked the multi gpu box it worked perfectly. I also use RadeonPro which allows you to trick the drivers into using different crossfire compatibilty profiles for games. For instance, Killing floor. Doesn't support crossfire at all. Hard locked my machine if I had crossfire enabled. Killing Floor is a UT mod. Use RadeonPro to make a profile that runs the UT3 crossfire profile when killing floor is launched. Hey presto! Works perfectly! So. I agree that multi-gpu setups are problematic but since I went 6870 crossfire I've always managed to find a way round the problems without too much headache. And when it does work it's really good. Yes it draws more power and generates more heat but to be honest my idle and load temps haven't increased but I've got a great air flow case and a temperature controlled fan controller which kicks in 2 120 mm fans on the side panel when the temp in the case starts getting warm. These 2 fans are quieter than the gpu coolers so they don't spin up as much. Here's some Unigine Heaven benchmark runs with single and duel GPU that I did when I got the second 6870. Single card: Unigine Heaven Benchmark v2.1 FPS: 33.8 Scores: 851 Min FPS: 17.6 Max FPS: 76.0 Hardware Binary: Windows 32bit Visual C++ 1500 Release May 21 2010 Operating system: Windows 7 (build 7600) 64bit CPU model: Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Quad CPU Q9550 @ 2.83GHz CPU flags: 4003MHz MMX SSE SSE2 SSE3 SSSE3 SSE41 HTT GPU model: AMD Radeon HD 6800 Series 8.801.0.0 1024Mb Settings Render: direct3d11 Mode: 2048x1152 fullscreen Shaders: high Textures: high Filter: trilinear Anisotropy: 4x Occlusion: enabled Refraction: enabled Volumetric: enabled Replication: disabled Tessellation: normal Crossfire: Unigine Heaven Benchmark v2.1 FPS: 59.2 Scores: 1491 Min FPS: 21.3 Max FPS: 134.3 Hardware Binary: Windows 32bit Visual C++ 1500 Release May 21 2010 Operating system: Windows 7 (build 7600) 64bit CPU model: Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Quad CPU Q9550 @ 2.83GHz CPU flags: 4003MHz MMX SSE SSE2 SSE3 SSSE3 SSE41 HTT GPU model: AMD Radeon HD 6800 Series 8.801.0.0 CrossFireX 1024Mb Settings Render: direct3d11 Mode: 2048x1152 fullscreen Shaders: high Textures: high Filter: trilinear Anisotropy: 4x Occlusion: enabled Refraction: enabled Volumetric: enabled Replication: disabled Tessellation: normal Average FPS jumped from 33.8 to 59.2! not quite 100% performance increase but pretty damn close! So I would say if you don't mind having a faff around then multi gpu can and does work really well. If your adverse to fiddling then single gpu is the way forward for you. Overall I'm pleased with mine and glad I did it. But I'm an IT pro so fiddling with computers is my bread and butter. Hope this helps.
looks like a lot of tinkering, as you said. guess there's a decision for OP, do you mind tinkering? i personally simply can't be bothered to do it, and get fed up with the game if it doesn't work straight out of the box, or even if i forgot my password (GTA4 rockstar social club). that is why i would simply just go and buy a single GPU configuration. never worry about driver versions or game compatibility. i am the kind of guy believes in "if it ain't broken, don't fix it." still using same Firefox profile from firefox 1. didn't install SP1 until last week where i got infected by "Win 7 security 2011" malware. and was still using Nod32 from over 2 years ago (now known as ESET security centre) up until i got infected.
I see you've got your CPU OC'ed to 4Ghz. Looks to me like your not adverse to a bit of tinkering there yourself my good man. I agree it isn't for everyone and when I next come to upgrade my gpu(s) I'll probably go back to a single gpu setup. The reason I went down this route was to spread the cost. I had my old 285 which was starting to show it's age. I was on a very defined budget for my GPU upgrade as at the time the wife had just lost her job so we had to be careful with the cash. I was waiting for the 570 to land but when it did it was slightly outside my budget so I went for the 6870 with the idea that I could then in a few months time get another and crossfire them. Worked out for me and luckily she found another job quickly.
tinkered to 4GHz, then for 100% hassle-free stability, downclocked to 3.8GHz without any voltage change. nothing else is overclocked, memory is even downclocked (cos 3.8GHz can't do 1600MHz) with default advertised voltage. that's how much i value my hassle-free-ness.
Crysis 2 has a SLI patch now. Its working beautifully on sli'd 580's no flickering fog or smoke. Can't really comment on the heat as its the water cooled set up.
For me I would want the guaranteed driver support long term. If I spent £800 on two cards plus all the possible expense of upgrading your cooling and power... it has to run the latest games @ high res for 2 years minimum. If the drivers won't get updated for most if not all the latest AAA games in that time... I'm not interested
