I've currently got a Sapphire 7950 OC edition and I'm wondering if it is worth getting another one. I currently have eyefinity setup but I tend to just run my games on my central monitor (an Iiyama 27" with 2x23" LG IPS panels as my sides) for the performance increase.
I appreciate trying to run games on high setting with just one 7950 for eyefinity is asking quite a bit, so I'm wondering if it's worth getting a second one to help things out.
In the past I've used crossfire (2x6870's) and had an OK experience. Between driver issues and incompatibility it was honestly a bit of a hastle! Trying to get it to work with eyefinity as well created some really strange bugs. sing WSGF and Flawless Widescreen tends to fix most of them and unsupported games.
So my main questions : Is it worth it? If so, can I crossfire with a different 7950 than the Sapphire I currently have? I've noticed some going quite cheap but my exact model seems to be pretty high! I'm in the UK if that helps!
The worth it part is up to you,mate. I'm not entirely sure how 2 7950s will scale on a eyefinity setup. I'm actually amazed that you can still find 7950s.Between AMD phasing them out and it being extremely popular for currency mining,i would have thought they'd be difficult to come by.
To answer the other question,yes,you can use a 7950 from another manufacturer in a crossfire setup. Just be mindful of the speed they run at.The cards will run at the speed of the slower card.
I've found a couple of 7970's that are in my price range and have fairly good reviews, what do you think of this model? I've leaning towards the 7970 as it's only a little more than the 7950's I'm looking at and the clock speed is slightly faster than my 7950 (OC model).
Ha thanks for pointing me to that post! Fingers crossed we see the price come down a bit!
Is there a particular 7970 that you would recommend? I can overclock my 7950 to about 950Ghz so I dont need one of the 1GHz models....but what ever you recommend would be great to have a look!
Do you think the store prices will lower too or would this be mainly for used cards? I imagine cards used for mining have been run pretty hard! Any advice on where to keep an eye out?
I'm always a little suspicious about buying used tech!
stores will have to lower the prices, maybe back to the msrp or a little bit lower to compete against the soon to be massive resale market. i too would be wary of buying these used cards too, but you know there will be plenty of people to pick them up decreasing the sales of new cards, so those prices just have to come down.
Up to you man, but I had a horrible experience with cross firing my 7970s. In bf4, the average fps went up, but the minimums went down a lot. To the point where I would rather play with 1 card. However, the r9 290s crossfired exceptionally well for me. Ultimately it comes down to support from the game devs and amd's software team, but I wouldnt be cross firing any amd cards other than the r9 290 or 290x.
Dude,you can push the 7950 alot further than 950Ghz. I've got mine pushed to 1050,and that is no sweat for the 7950.I want to push it up to 1150,1200 if i get lucky.
Follow the instructions in the link below. You'll notice how much your card has been held back and how much more you can get out of it.
