Just recently bought a Dell Optiplex 9020mt with an i7 4770 to replace my aging C2D T9400. It came with 2 Radeon HD 8490s in crossfire. Is running these crappy cards in crossfire going to hurt performance vs just one, or is the onboard 4600 better than either of those options? Mostly for watching HD content and playing games from 05-15.
For HD content the iGPU would be more than suffient. When it comes to gaming it might be worth running some benchmarks to see how the GPU's actually perform. My guess is somewhere between not great and worse than not great. A single 8490 would probably be fine for older games but it might be worth chucking something like a 750Ti / 960 in it to properly playing anything newer (note - those cards are just examples I could think of right now and should be relatively cheap at CeX or similar).
I figured I might have to just bench each configuration to see, but was hoping I could get away with just advice. I can't test just the 4600 because it's only vga and my monitor is dp/hdmi. I'll have to get a vga to dp to actually use it, and wanted to see if it was worth it before I spent money on an adapter. I'm not too worried about maximizing performance with a new GPU. Relative to what I've been using the last 7 years, it's going to blow it away, regardless of configuration. Just want to get the best performance with what I have. GPU is on the horizon, but I just blew all my money digging myself out of the c2d generation of hardware. I think I did pretty well for what I spent, but there's definitely room for improvement.
https://www.videocardbenchmark.net/gpu.php?gpu=Radeon+HD+8490&id=2841 Exactly the comparison you want. The HD4600 looks to be twice as good as a single card. I litterally can't find any information on crossfired ones, probably due to it being not a very good solution. Looking at it just using the HD4600 would probably perform the same/better, not be driver dependant and not suffer with draw backs like micro-stuttering associated with multi-GPU solutions. On top of this those two card are using power and producing heat for basically no gain. My advice, grab an adapter, give it a test, if its not as good return the adapter (use someone like amazon).
That's helpful, thanks. I noticed no difference in performance in game with crossfire enabled or disabled, so I'll grab an adapter and give the 4600 a shot. I tried CS:GO, BF: Bad Company 2,Torchlight 2 and Call of Duty 2.
Well, I did some informal tests with all three configurations. There was virtually no difference between 1 or 2 of the 8490s, so I won't include crossfire after this. In most benchmarks and real world gaming, the Intel HD 4600 outperformed the Radeon 8490. However, there's a *. The * is that some games experience artifacting with the HD 4600. CSGO and BFBC2 had black patches in the menus and in game. I decided that picking between **** and turds wasn't viable, so I bought a used AMD r7 260x for $45CAD. Haven't tested it in my i7 PC yet, but in my C2D desktop it played games better than the i7 with either of the other cards.
