Any one know roughly how these will perform? I've been piecing together parts to build my lady a rig as her laptop is dying (fan failure) and she can't play loads of her Steam games due to laptop being a bit lame. So I've been buying her bits on the cheap gradually to knock something up for her. I sent a faulty motherboard back yesterday for a refund but instead of buying the same one I decided to claw back a few bob by getting one of these for £59 (using the refund). It supports Crossfire. So I already bought her a 4890 1gb Vapor X and was poking around on a classified forum last night and managed to bag a second 4890 with a Arctic Twin Turbo (no fans they broke) for £10 (shipping). I'm going to stick (literally) a pair of 92mm Arctic fans to it that I have lying around. Any idea on performance that would roughly equate to anything modern? Any advice on Crossfire? what's Radeon Pro? how does one use it? I've been out of the loop for what seems like forever on AMD. What's the best driver to use? Thanks guys and girls !
Not really sure what performance to expect from 2 4890's. I know that driver's for the 4 series stopped a while ago which might affect how well they play modern games. Also you will be limited to DX 10 only.
Well tbh the last part is music to my ears, given DX11 to me has been disappointing. Bummer about the drivers though.
This was my first crossfire setup that i used. Think i got about a 70% improvement in games that supported crossfire. Ran well but the 570s got released not long after so i jumped on a couple of them. Still got one 4890 that's used in a back up system, paired them up with a phenom 550 unlocked to a quad @4ghz. At the time was playing bf2, rfactor and some others i cant remember.
I played with a pair in CF for a bit and was pleasantly surprised. Sizeable jump in performance (I didn't bench it thoroughly). No DX10 as mentioned above, but that's not a deal-breaker!
IIRC it was only Sniper Elite and Anna (and some other medieval game) that she couldn't play. Would have been nice for her to have more oopmh when we play L4D though as her draw distance on the lappy was crap so she kept dying lol. Sadly her laptop is literally about to die. It keeps shutting down, giving her warning messages and so on and being a HP it's a total bumburger to work on so I've left it alone. She had a HP here from before we met that needed a new keyboard and I ended up breaking it trying to get the keyboard out. Totally poo to work on. She had a windfall so we ordered her a new laptop (HP Envy with Beats.. I5 4gb ram and 7500? something Radeon for £429 inc) and now I want to provide her a desktop for higher end gaming (but not cutting edge as I pointed out above.. Just to run some 3d stuff without being a shutting down slide show )
Whilst the official drivers have been stopped, on Guru3d then there's modded drivers up to 12.11 beta 11. i've not tried them for a bit - well, it was a temporary install for a couple of months on my mostly non-gaming machine (there's bits of low level Win8 apps gaming) to use with a 4870x2, whilst i waited for the money to upgrade my 580 to a 780 in my other machine (albeit that i ended up with a 2 month old Titan for £500) - however i had no issues at all. YMMV of course. Performance-wise, unless you're gaming at a higher res than 1920x1600, the 4870x2 was roughly between the 550Ti Boost & 570 on the NVidia side of things... ...& the 6870 & 6950 on the AMD one... (obviously varying on a game by game basis) ...& your pair of cards should be a bit faster than the 4870x2.
tbh you would be best getting card like 570 (£50) or similar. keep an eye out on card. there some good deals around
This isn't a very good idea tbh. Crossfire requires upto date drivers and I am not sure older cards will get that. A 560TI or a 6950 would have been a better bet around the 70 mark second hand.
This. It's ~6 generations old now so drivers won't be updated for CrossFire on that kind of platform. Single card should be OK at reasonable resolutions, assuming she's not an FPS nut? The 4890 VaporX's were very good - should do close to 1GHz core.
I actually have experience with this, having used Xfire 4890s for a long time until I upgraded to 6870s. You'll have no problems playing most modern games on high settings at 1080p.
Well by a twist of fate I shan't be using these. I'm getting the 7990 and my lady is getting the 670s in SLI. Should take care of us for a while to come
