Posted: 3/14/2010 9:00:38 AM EDT
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I'm in the process of building a new PC, the last one I built was about 6 years ago.
Anyways I have a question about ATI's Crossfire system. If I want to run to video cards in Crossfire that are PCI 2.0 X16 my mobo has to have 2 PCI 2.0 X16 slots correct? Only reason I ask was I was given a free ASUS mobo that has two PCI 2.0 slots but one is a x8. |
| How much are you looking to spend? Instead of laying out potentially $300-$600 for a pair of Radeons AND a new motherboard just to run Crossfire, you can pick up a single card for under $200 that will run almost anything under the sun as fast as you'll need it to go (unless you're trying to play Crysis on a 30" panel). |
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i ran an sli (nVidia) rig that run at 8x and it was an asus board, it did alright with some tweaking. sli/crossfire to me is just a waste of money, that was the first and last multi gpu system i will build. next gaming pc i build will be a good high end single video card. |
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This is somewhat the setup I have been thinking about building, its been a while since I built a PC.
Antec Three Hundred Black ATX Mid Tower Case Undetermined Power supply, I need to research ASUS M4A79XTD EVO AM3 ATX AMD Motherboard ATI 5770 Video card AMD Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition Deneb 3.2GHz 8gbs of DDR3 OCZ AMD Black Edition A good CPU fan setup And I still have to figure storage out, don't need more than 500-600gigs but want to run several hard drives to back up files |
| You should be good if you stick with cards from the HD4xxx family. PCIE 2.0 x8 has more than enough bandwidth for a single (non X2) card. In theory full PCIE 2.0 x16 would be better. But as long as you stick with a single GPU card you should be fine. I am sure the 5xxx series should be fine as well, but if anything you will take a minimal performance hit. |