That was the impression I was getting from the whole mess of nomeclature. And running a triple Crossfire/SLI build would still offer some performance gain, but obviously not as much as running just two more powerful cards. This is mainly because there is hardly any one time where the cards are completely filling their potential bandwidth except during synthetic benchmarks where it is possible to provide full load on all of the available GPUs. And due to the interesting capacity of all the cards to evenly split the workload across themselves, you are still coming out ahead on the overall bandwidth shared between the cards. I, however, would likely run two 5970's and then a relatively inexpensive Nvidia workstation card just to get some CUDA cores for a dedicated PhysX card. Plus the single slot Quadro cards are very attractive. And since it isn't acting in crossfire/SLI it would probably be able to get the x8 bandwidth without causing the quad Crossfire to collapse. But that is just a bit overkill.
Also, PCI-e 2.0 x8 is still capable of transfer rates of 8Gb/s. That is pretty crazy fast, plus it's basically like RAID 0, so it adds the speeds up. So you wind up with about 24 GB/s at full blast.
yes you right about the bandwidth thing..
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but the possibility to put in a crosfire setup in slot 1/3 and a standalone Nvidia in slot 4 (if there is space for it) can be intressting.. i didnt knew that was possible ☻
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but if you setup triple setup gonne run at x8, but overall you get x24 speed then...at full blast ofc. If you gonne run a dual setup you gonne get x32 speed. jeej im getting it ☻
thank you very much ♥
Yeah, but even with the consideration for PCI-e 2.0 speeds, you often don't wind up taxing them enough to fill even the x8 slot's bandwidth. Unless of course you have a dual GPU card... I really wish that I had $400 lying around, because a guy on Ebay is selling his quad crossfire 5970 setup. Which supports DX11. And he only wants that much for it. Of course you'll need around 1000W just to boot the things, but still. That is some massive computational power. Imagine how many bitcoins you could mine with that. You are talking over 3 Teraflops of computational power. Ooh.
About the dedicated PhysX card, as far as I know, if you don't have the display hooked to the Nvidia card, the Nvidia Graphics Control software allows you to set it to a PhysX card rather than a graphics adapter.
cool i didnt knew that was possible ☻
wow that crosfire setup sounds nice ☻.
im still thinking maybe someday if i have the money for it, to buy a new mainboard, then to put 2 7950´s in crosfire. on it.. i have now a single 7870 ghz edition, its not a bad card, can play crisis 3 on high, with about 30/45 fps. at the moment im happy with it, but, i think in the future i think i wanne have more performance ☻
Thanks Angel, I did a bit of research and this seems to be the perfect choice! :)