Crossfire possible and any good?

hello i am wondering about buying another 

sapphire radeon hd 7850 2g gddr5 http://www.komplett.no/k/ki.aspx?sku=757653

i already have one and i am maybe buying another one. could i crossfire it and would it make my preformence much better?

 

Well yes, it will make your system a lot more powerful. 

It competes head on with 7970 and beats it, but can the other parts of your system keep up with it tho?

i have 

psu Cooler Master Silent Pro M2 1000W PSU

cpu intel® Core i5-3570K Processor

Corsair Vengeance DDR3 1600MHz 8GB CL9 x2

and MSI Z77A-GD65, Socket-1155

 

possible yes advisable no. look for framerating on youtube.

why should i not?

For any multi-GPU situation (AMD or Nvidia), it's spotty. Theoretically, yes, two 7850s in crossfire will be a bit faster than a single 7970, but that's not always true. Some games actually runslower in crossfire than with a single card. Whether you'll get good performance out of it depends on what games you want to play. You'll have to look up crossfire benchmarks for those games and see if it makes a worthwhile difference.

For crossfire specifically, up until the last 6 months to a year, AMD hasn't been really paying attention to frame-latency issues. Sometimes in crossfire, animations stutter significantly more than they do with a single GPU, even though they're technically pushing more FPS. Some people say this is unbearable, some people don't notice a difference. Either way, AMD is working on drivers to help the situation. We'll see how that turns out.

That said, I'd prefer a single 7970 over crossfire 7850s, but that might not work for you financially or otherwise.

thank you that helped! so now i have a new question what if i get a navida card and run 1 monitor on navida card and the other one on the sapphire. is that any good?

Well you can run your games on a different GPU, but that wont really help your performance, it will if the card is significally faster, but in that case, theres no reason to keep a 7850 around, because you can run multiple monitors off pretty much any card now.

If you want performance and stability, single powerful card.

I would sell off the old 7850 and get something faster, if you really need the extra performance.

Only advantage in Nvidia + ati setup is having the nvidia card handle physix, and giving you extra display ports, BUt you cant really crossfire / sli with it, perhaps there are some hacked and cracked drivers, but its not worth the hassle.

 

IF you want to hook up multiple monitors, you can just get a adapter like dvi to hdmi, or dvi to vga etc, and everything works just fine.

I would just like to throw in that getting a second card is a good move if you are on a budget. MOST games that would require more than a 7850 will work fine for cossfire. If you got the money, just wait for the next gen later this year and get a new more powerful card. If you are budget concious, then get a second card and crossfire. You will get the performance gain you want in almost every game you will need it for.

Can I just say that I have a genuine hate for people who bash multi-card configurations? 

Yes, you can crossfire, and yes it is advisable. I have experience with both Crossfire and SLI, and despite people saying there are inherent glitches with the technology, I have never run into a single problem.

Is it true that some games don't support the technology? Yes, but they are few and far between, and chances are that either AMD or Nvidia are going to release a Crossfire or SLI profile for it a few days after it comes out anyway, so it will work properly.

Let's put it this way. The vast majority of games are going to support Crossfire and SLI. If a game doesn't support it, then you're just running the game off of one card like you were before. The only time you see less performance with a multi-card configuration than with a single card is when drivers haven't matured yet. This means that either the game in question just came out and Nvidia/AMD are working on it, or the card is brand new and just doesn't have mature drivers yet.

In this case, the 7850 has been out for probably around a year. The drivers are mature, so the only issue you should have is that once in a while new games that just hit the market might not take full advantage of both your cards. This should be fixed rather quickly with the next set of drivers  and crossfire profiles though.

People who think Crossfire and SLI hurts performance are basing their opinions on outliers. 99 percent of games work amazingly well with Crossfire and SLI, but you get these people who only look at the 1 percent of games that don't work well and say the technology doesn't work. These people are just patently stupid.

/rant

Anyway, your PSU has more than enough juice to support two Radeon HD 7850s, and your motherboard has support for it. Definitely grab another card. Just make sure both of them are plugged into the right PCI-E slots and that the crossfire bridge is connected between the cards. After that make sure to setup Crossfire in AMD's catalyst control center (usually involves clicking a check box) and you'll be good to go.

Crossfire is having trouble with microstuttering, and a lot of framedropping and so on. Read up on "Framerating". You will certainly see a performance difference but it's said to be not as pleasing to look at as SLI at the moment. AMD is working on a fix.

I do have two GTX 680s in my system [oh how I wish I went for AMD ><] and I find myself having one of them turned off 98% of the time. So unless you are in need of more GPU power, don't do it.

Another option was to sell your 7850 and take the money for the second one and try to shoot for a 7950 / 7970 which will surely be the more pleasing experience.

I thought they fixed the micro stuttering problem. It's not like it happens in every game either. My old rig had two Radeon HD 6850s in crossfire, and I never noticed it.

I'm using two GTX 580's in SLI right now, and they're doing great.

There is something wrong with your setup man... I think the "framerating" you are talking about is micro-suttering which is worst with crossfire and SLI, but there is adaptive vertical sync and frame buffering to compensate, and be far most the time you dont even notice it. And if you want better performance and doent have $400+ bucks for a high end card, then the SLI/crossfire is the best way to go.

Microstuttering is neither gone on SLI nor Crossfire. At the moment it is less noticable on SLI but still present. [Try to play FarCry3 it's horrible]

And my 2nd card is disabled because I don't need it most of the time not because of microstuttering, which I found to be very game dependant [Crysis 3 has very minor, Far Cry 3: Blooddragon is horrible, lil better with newer drivers though].

Still, single card > dual card, but dual card certainly has it's value.

Just to give some input from personal experience

I ran Farcry 3 on 660 OC SLI on 5760x1080 and everything on ultra, no micro stuttering, i dont know how they fare on AMD cards, but Nvidia seems to have it sorted out, i have been running with it for well over a month now, and no problems so far. (Expt. for APB Reloaded, that thing is just a mess for GTX 600 series)

So im guessing its different for everyone and has something to do with CPU and Motherboard chipset, more tests are needed to say anything for sure.

 

Now wikipedia has an article about this, indicaiting that for Nvidia, there is a small percentage of micro stuttering, but for AMD, its massive, or well it was, no recent experience. 5-7% is within limits, and you wont really notice it, unless you are allready running on low fps to begin with.

 

 

Until I get guarantees that crossfire is fixed I am not even going to consider buying a second card.

I have mixed experiences with crossfire.

When it worked, gaming was heaven

When it didnt, gaming was hell

I had a 5750 in crossfire and now a 7970 in crossfire, both setups with different brand.

I don't know what experiences you had with xfire, and I shouldn't really judge (anyone for that matter)...

But my experience with xfire were almost flawless. I always keep track of my GPU usage (maybe like a fanatic) since my 7970 xfire setup, and In all the top titles recently i get a dual 100% gpu usage, And my FPS (really!) doubles between 1 7970 and xfire.

as for both setups, my scaling was always a perfect 2.0. (or maybe 1.95 when I wasn't looking)

My stomach always turns when I read about "crossfire problems", Cause I never really was part of it. Maybe I am just lucky in my taste of games.

Yeah, it's hit and miss based on game and drivers. I run a single gtx 680, but not everyone has the money to drop on the spot for a new high end card. If he has a decent card and the money available for a second card, then its a good way to go.
.. and I didn't mean to imply that microstuttering is gone on either, just that there are some technologies out there to reduce/minimize it. Adaptive verticle sync, frame buffering, etc. And for some reason (probably drivers) it is worse on AMD cards, but still present on nvidia cards.

I think the people who complain about crossfire and SLI not working correctly are the same people who complain about wireless gaming mice having lag issues. When wireless mice first came out, they sucked, but now I can't even tell the difference between a wired and a wireless mouse, except for the fact that you have to charge one every once in a while.

The same goes for Crossfire and SLI. When the technology first came out there were a lot of problems, but the technology has been out for 10+ years and is almost flawless. People just don't seem to understand how advancement works.

I am with you on crossfire and SLI, but wireless mice is a problem because of battery more than lag.. When a rechargable battery dies or gets low, or you have to replace nonchargable batteries which add cost to your mouse, all of these are just annoyances that take away value and convenience from the mouse. Now input lag is pretty nominal.. if noticable at all, but for perfectionist, each mid-low quality device adds an extrememly small amount of input lag.. but it adds up.. again this is for the perfectionist.

 

All said.. wireless mice aren't as bad as they say, but they introduce problems or inconvenience you just don't have with a wired mouse. If you want one get one though, they are still good.

Where SLI and crossfire are different though: xfire and sli do add problems that dont exist with single cards, but they also add a lot of value in sheer performance gain. So its a very different case form wired and wireless mouse.