I'll tell the whole story so I don't get judged for buying a 5770 in 2012
 lol

I was looking to replace a LGA 775 mobo for a E8300 I have, I just couldn't let go of it. So I find an ad that had a whole tower for $400 so I decided goodbye E8300 I'll sell it later and get this tower instead.

The build is like this:

i5 2400

antec lanboy case

crossfire 5770's

Intel DP67GB or BG can't be bothered to double check.

100GB SSD OCZ

950Watt offbrand PSU

Some liquid cooling unit from an alienware PC

Anyway I figure, all that for $400 sounds good however. The 5770 is idle at about 126 F roughly 50c.

My question I need help with is, is this a high temp for a 5770 in CF? Only one card seems to be running at this temp, though I can't be sure, I just found the time to hook it up to a monitor and actually boot it up into the OS.

If it's a random junk power supply, then I'd replace that.  But otherwise, $400 for that is pretty good if everything is in good working order.  Even with only a single 5770, $400 would be pretty good.

I'd say, don't worry too much about the idle temperatures, unless they're doing something weird.  It doesn't matter if it's 40 C at idle or 50 C.  Check the load temperatures, and if you're only hitting 70 C under heavy loads, you're fine.  If you're pushing into the 90s, then you should probably do something about it.

Thanks a bunch, I was somewhat concerned. Ran it for about 60+ hours and it went up to 58C but I decided to do a fresh OS install so we'll see how that goes, after drivers n stuff are reinstalled. Maybe put SC2 in and max it out for an hour, get some real life performance tests.

I remember you had a thread or a response to a thread about how crossfire wasn't necessarily a good thing, kind of the reason I hadn't tried it in my other PC's actually. So I wasn't looking forward to it in the first place, but the price was too good to pass up lol

It's not that CrossFire and SLI are intrinsically bad.  Two of card X will generally be better than one of card X.  But it won't be nearly as good as one of a card twice as powerful as X.  With the 5770, the latter option was available (as the 5870) right from launch day.

Now, that wasn't a choice for you, as you bought it used.  It's a blunder on the part of whoever built the machine initially.  And I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if it led to him wanting to get rid of the computer sooner and/or more cheaply than he would have if he had a single 5870, though that is unknowable.

It may not be completely releated, but I was wondering is it worth getting another HD6950 to make crossfire on this configuration:

AMD Phenom II X4 955 BE 3.2GHz

4GB DDR3 RAM

Sapphire HD6950 1GB

Seasonic 520W S12 II Bronze PSU

Gigabyte 870A-UD3 rev2 MBO

Windows 7 x64 Professional

Would it make much difference, like at least 30% fps boost? I know I would probably need to get stronger PSU too right?

Don't know much about crossfire/sli technology, and is it maybe better to invest into single card (maybe some nice nvidia for a change) setup so I don't have to buy new PSU.

Or probably this conf should do its part for a while until its time to get completely new machine. It is very important to me to be able to play all new games maxed out.

Originally posted by Quizzical

It's not that CrossFire and SLI are intrinsically bad.  Two of card X will generally be better than one of card X.  But it won't be nearly as good as one of a card twice as powerful as X.  With the 5770, the latter option was available (as the 5870) right from launch day.

Now, that wasn't a choice for you, as you bought it used.  It's a blunder on the part of whoever built the machine initially.  And I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if it led to him wanting to get rid of the computer sooner and/or more cheaply than he would have if he had a single 5870, though that is unknowable.

Sure the one high end card would probally be better.. but saying that i cant remember the prices of the 5770 compared to the 5870 on release but ill say what i did with my 6850s..

It was lot cheaper for me to buy two ati 6850s than it was to get the top end card, plus the two 6850s come very close to the performance of the top end 6000 series card in games that actually support crossfire.. So for me it was the way to go at the time... i am guessing it was the same with the 5770..

@thedarkness

6950's are still pretty good and they can be had second hand for dirt cheap, problem is you'd need to upgrade that power supply if you wanted to crossfire them. Unless your single one isn't performing how you'd like i wouldn't bother tbh.

Originally posted by thedarkess

Gigabyte 870A-UD3 rev2 MBO

 

Your motherboard only nominally supports CrossFire.  Putting a second gaming card in a PCI Express 2.0 x4 slot will mean it is substantially hamstrung by a lack of PCI Express bandwidth.  I wouldn't bother with CrossFire.  If you want to upgrade, try a GeForce GTX 670, or if you prefer AMD, maybe a Radeon HD 7970.

For you guys thinking about Crossfire... I can't recommend it.  I had two 5850s in Crossfire, and ended up with worse performance than a single 5850.  Maybe something was screwed up on my build, though.

Maybe Quizzical can explain, all I know is every benchmark I ran, I had better performance with a single 5850.  Not to mention the insane reduction in temps after removing the second 5850.

Moral of the story: I wanted to beef up my rig with a Crossfire configuration, but now instead I have a $200+ paper weight.

Originally posted by Quizzical

It's not that CrossFire and SLI are intrinsically bad.  Two of card X will generally be better than one of card X.  But it won't be nearly as good as one of a card twice as powerful as X.  With the 5770, the latter option was available (as the 5870) right from launch day.

Now, that wasn't a choice for you, as you bought it used.  It's a blunder on the part of whoever built the machine initially.  And I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if it led to him wanting to get rid of the computer sooner and/or more cheaply than he would have if he had a single 5870, though that is unknowable.

I was under the impression that he was really proud of his config.

So reselling both 5770's for the same or lesser price of a 5870 and then getting one is the way to go?

Originally posted by gigat

For you guys thinking about Crossfire... I can't recommend it.  I had two 5850s in Crossfire, and ended up with worse performance than a single 5850.  Maybe something was screwed up on my build, though.

 

Maybe Quizzical can explain, all I know is every benchmark I ran, I had better performance with a single 5850.  Not to mention the insane reduction in temps after removing the second 5850.

 

Moral of the story: I wanted to beef up my rig with a Crossfire configuration, but now instead I have a $200+ paper weight.

While this might not pertain to your situation Quiz hinted to the most common reason Xfire/SLI is a poor upgrade option (unless you had planned for it in advance and even then I'd consider a waste of money unless you got a steal of a deal), very few motherboards support full Xfire/SLI.  By full I mean two full PCIe x 16 slots.  Most will typically support 1 at full PCIe x 16 and the other at x 4, or both at x 8 (which I suspect was your problem and the reason a single card outperformed two).  The few motherboards that due support two x 16 slots are usually at the upper end of the price spectrum.

EDIT: Ridelynn hit on the other "most" common reason for poor performance vs a single version of the same GPU.

---

Originally posted by gigat
For you guys thinking about Crossfire... I can't recommend it.  I had two 5850s in Crossfire, and ended up with worse performance than a single 5850.  Maybe something was screwed up on my build, though.

 

Maybe Quizzical can explain, all I know is every benchmark I ran, I had better performance with a single 5850.  Not to mention the insane reduction in temps after removing the second 5850.

 

Moral of the story: I wanted to beef up my rig with a Crossfire configuration, but now instead I have a $200+ paper weight.

---

This isn't uncommon.

The problem with Crossfire (and SLI) is that it's very driver/game dependent. Some games will perform very well, as they have a budget to get optimized, or the projected install base to make it worth AMD/nVidia's time to ensure that they do get optimized ("The Way It's Meant to Be Played"/"Gaming Evolved" type thing).

So not every game gets optimized. In fact, most games probably don't get optimized - they may happen to get some performance boost from a generic profile - but far from double the performance (typically around 30-50%), and in some cases, may actually perform worse than a single card, or not run at all.

And for games that are optimized, there can be a delay of days/weeks/months from their release until optimized drivers and profiles are released.

SLI/Crossfire is very hit or miss - you usually see pretty good results on the big name titles and benchmarks, most titles getting rather mediocre performance, and a few titles actually being worse. A single video card is still driver dependent, but to a much less degree.

There are only really two situations where I recommend Crossfire/SLI:
*) You need speed/performance that can't be had from a single video card (multiple monitors, 3D, etc) - and this means you are essentially only looking at the top-tier cards in the first place - which is going to be very expensive, and require a lot of space, cooling, and power.
*) You get the second card for an absolute steal (either free or good deal, not actually advocating theft here), and don't have to upgrade the rest of your rig to make it work (no need for a new power supply/motherboard/case/etc - or you get those items for really really cheap/free as well). Sometimes people come across second-hand hardware that can make sense to throw it in just because it doesn't cost anything to try it and see.

For you to actually get worse scores in benchmarks is a bit atypical though. Although the 5850 line there were some commonly reported problems with some of them, who knows, you could have had a lemon card in there or something.

Originally posted by Caldrin

Originally posted by Quizzical

It's not that CrossFire and SLI are intrinsically bad.  Two of card X will generally be better than one of card X.  But it won't be nearly as good as one of a card twice as powerful as X.  With the 5770, the latter option was available (as the 5870) right from launch day.

Now, that wasn't a choice for you, as you bought it used.  It's a blunder on the part of whoever built the machine initially.  And I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if it led to him wanting to get rid of the computer sooner and/or more cheaply than he would have if he had a single 5870, though that is unknowable.

Sure the one high end card would probally be better.. but saying that i cant remember the prices of the 5770 compared to the 5870 on release but ill say what i did with my 6850s..

 

It was lot cheaper for me to buy two ati 6850s than it was to get the top end card, plus the two 6850s come very close to the performance of the top end 6000 series card in games that actually support crossfire.. So for me it was the way to go at the time... i am guessing it was the same with the 5770..

 

 

There's plenty of examples where buying SLI will save you money and give you a better performance than the single card solution. Another example was buying 2 GTX560 Ti cards, instead of a  single GTX580. They were cheaper and performed quite a deal better.

You might as always, run into issues. Some uneeded hassle with drivers and new games, mostly it will work fine after some new drivers has been released.

And then microstuttering, which is something people don't see at all, or people start screaming and shouting about as soon as they realise it. For me, I need to monitor the FPS, if I see in drop up and down 59-60, then I realise there's some microstutterting going on. And that's that, basically.

Originally posted by miguksaram

Originally posted by gigat

For you guys thinking about Crossfire... I can't recommend it.  I had two 5850s in Crossfire, and ended up with worse performance than a single 5850.  Maybe something was screwed up on my build, though.

 

Maybe Quizzical can explain, all I know is every benchmark I ran, I had better performance with a single 5850.  Not to mention the insane reduction in temps after removing the second 5850.

 

Moral of the story: I wanted to beef up my rig with a Crossfire configuration, but now instead I have a $200+ paper weight.

While this might not pertain to your situation Quiz hinted to the most common reason Xfire/SLI is a poor upgrade option (unless you had planned for it in advance and even then I'd consider a waste of money unless you got a steal of a deal), very few motherboards support full Xfire/SLI.  By full I mean two full PCIe x 16 slots.  Most will typically support 1 at full PCIe x 16 and the other at x 4, or both at x 8 (which I suspect was your problem and the reason a single card outperformed two).  The few motherboards that due support two x 16 slots are usually at the upper end of the price spectrum.

 

EDIT: Ridelynn hit on the other "most" common reason for poor performance vs a single version of the same GPU.

I'm sorry, but Quizz would never advise against SLI based on it using a 16 and an 8 slot. Or 2 8 slots. Sorry Quizz for stealing your thunder. Might want to type a new wall anyway ;). Short story is that an x8 has more than enough bandwith for a days day GPU.

Asides cost of purchase of the GPUs, you will have to look at Motherboard and PSU. Most motherboards have a perfectly fine SLI solution presented. If you want a quality brand, and some overclocking headroom, you'll be hard pressed to find that ASUS or Gigabyte that dont also support SLI.

The issue of the PSU remains the same, you want a quality part, and from there choose the correct size. What watttagge would you want for a GTX580? What wattagge would you want from GTX560 in SLI?

You'll end up buying the same PSU at the end of the day, a 750 watt Corsair or something.

I'd like to chip in my two cents about crossfire.

I run two 7970s in my computer.  Sometimes, a game runs much better with both of them working together in crossfire.  Other times, such as Guild Wars 2 beta, performance is far worse.  Sometimes running two cards makes a game unplayable, sometimes running both makes a game playable for me at my huge freaking resolution.

But, the thing is with a crossfire setup - you can go into the AMD Control Center and disable crossfire if you run into any issues wtih a game!  So really if you want better performance in games that support it, and no issues in games that don't, you can have both with a few simple clicks in that control panel.

Originally posted by Trionicus

I was under the impression that he was really proud of his config.

 

So reselling both 5770's for the same or lesser price of a 5870 and then getting one is the way to go?

"I goofed up my configuration, so I'm trying to sell it" isn't a very good sales pitch.  More likely, he thinks it is a good configuration and simply isn't aware of the problems.

The reason I cited a Radeon HD 5870 is that it was available by the time the 5770 launched.  Today, you're better off with a single GeForce GTX 670 than two GeForce GTX 285s in SLI.  But if you were buying something three years ago, the latter was an option and the former wasn't.  That's why two GTX 285s in SLI was a reasonable choice then if you needed that level of performance, even though it wouldn't be a reasonable choice today.

Another reason to cite the 5870 is that a 5770 is basically half of a 5870.  It has half of the shaders, half of the TMUs, half of the ROPs, half of the memory channels, and so forth, and they're the same architecture and clocked the same.  Usually there isn't such a clean comparison of "this card is two of that card".  Rather, you get situations where, for example, the Radeon HD 7870 has 5/8 of the shaders and TMUs of a 7970, but 2/3 of the ROPs and memory channels, and they're also clocked differently.

The more recent cards with performance in the same ballpark as a Radeon HD 5870 are a GeForce GTX 560 Ti, Radeon HD 6950, and Radeon HD 7850.

Personally, what I'd do is to sell one of the 5770s if you can, and just use the other.  If you're happy with the performance, then great.  If not, then you buy some other card to upgrade from it.

Originally posted by Barbarbar

There's plenty of examples where buying SLI will save you money and give you a better performance than the single card solution. Another example was buying 2 GTX560 Ti cards, instead of a  single GTX580. They were cheaper and performed quite a deal better.

You might as always, run into issues. Some uneeded hassle with drivers and new games, mostly it will work fine after some new drivers has been released.

And then microstuttering, which is something people don't see at all, or people start screaming and shouting about as soon as they realise it. For me, I need to monitor the FPS, if I see in drop up and down 59-60, then I realise there's some microstutterting going on. And that's that, basically.

Once you spend more on the case, power supply, and motherboard to handle two GeForce GTX 560 Tis in SLI, they weren't still chepaer than the GeForce GTX 580.  Today, even ignoring the other costs, the two GTX 560 Tis would be more expensive than a single GTX 580.

Performance will vary from game to game.  In a game where SLI works as intended, yes, the SLI setup would be better, but probably not drastically so.  In games where SLI doesn't work as intended, the single card would be better.  A single card will work right far more reliably than an SLI or CrossFire setup.

Microstutter is more noticeable as the frame rates get lower.  If you're getting 100 frames per second, it will look very smooth whether it's from a single card or SLI/CrossFire, unless you've got some hitching problems or something.  If you're getting 30 frames per second from an SLI/CrossFire setup, then the microstutter is likely to be a lot more noticeable.  It actually varies wildly from game to game and from card to card.  But sometimes 30 frames per second from a single card would be a little better than the same average frame rate from an SLI/CrossFire setup, and sometimes it would be vastly better.

Originally posted by Barbarbar

I'm sorry, but Quizz would never advise against SLI based on it using a 16 and an 8 slot. Or 2 8 slots. Sorry Quizz for stealing your thunder. Might want to type a new wall anyway ;). Short story is that an x8 has more than enough bandwith for a days day GPU.

The usual setup is that if a motherboard will have two PCI Express slots and say you can operate one at x16 bandwidth if you don't use the other, or operate both at x8 simultaneously.  My expectation is that as video cards get faster, they'll tend to need more PCI Express bandwidth.  That seems to be how it was historically.

Note also that PCI Express 3.0 x8 bandwidth is the same as PCI Express 2.0 x16 bandwidth.  If you've got PCI Express 3.0 everything, then x8/x8 isn't a problem.  I'd be less enthusiastic about putting two high end cards in SLI/CrossFire in a PCI Express 2.0 x8/x8 setup.

Also, the dependence on PCI Express bandwidth varies wildly from one game to the next.  In some games, the performance difference between PCI Express 2.0 x16 and x4 is basically a rounding error.  In others, there's a substantial (e.g., 10%) dropoff from x16 to x8.

Originally posted by Quizzical

Originally posted by Barbarbar

There's plenty of examples where buying SLI will save you money and give you a better performance than the single card solution. Another example was buying 2 GTX560 Ti cards, instead of a  single GTX580. They were cheaper and performed quite a deal better.

You might as always, run into issues. Some uneeded hassle with drivers and new games, mostly it will work fine after some new drivers has been released.

And then microstuttering, which is something people don't see at all, or people start screaming and shouting about as soon as they realise it. For me, I need to monitor the FPS, if I see in drop up and down 59-60, then I realise there's some microstutterting going on. And that's that, basically.

Once you spend more on the case, power supply, and motherboard to handle two GeForce GTX 560 Tis in SLI, they weren't still chepaer than the GeForce GTX 580.  Today, even ignoring the other costs, the two GTX 560 Tis would be more expensive than a single GTX 580.

Performance will vary from game to game.  In a game where SLI works as intended, yes, the SLI setup would be better, but probably not drastically so.  In games where SLI doesn't work as intended, the single card would be better.  A single card will work right far more reliably than an SLI or CrossFire setup.

Microstutter is more noticeable as the frame rates get lower.  If you're getting 100 frames per second, it will look very smooth whether it's from a single card or SLI/CrossFire, unless you've got some hitching problems or something.  If you're getting 30 frames per second from an SLI/CrossFire setup, then the microstutter is likely to be a lot more noticeable.  It actually varies wildly from game to game and from card to card.  But sometimes 30 frames per second from a single card would be a little better than the same average frame rate from an SLI/CrossFire setup, and sometimes it would be vastly better.

Allright, I'm a bit drunk now. Been watching Italy kick Germanys behind, but I'll respond cause I believe I have a few points.

Case? No, you don't skimp on the case because you are buying a GTX 580. Who are you talking to? Your own theoretical self as usual.

And the motherboard. What would you advise for anyone going for a GTX580, or a GTX 670. Asrock Extreme, Asus Pro or whichever MSI solution. They can all handle both SLI and Crossfire. You surely don't want to advocate some micro atx board all of a sudden do you?

Where is this Quizzical board that is a perfect match for a topend GPU, that can't handle a 2 GPU solution

And with regards to the PSU, I'd get a 750 Watt somethingg of decent quality, regardless of whether I´'m going GTX560 Ti in crossfire, of GTX 580.

So at the end, the facts remain. SLI will give you a better performance when the game allows it to. And they were at launch cheaper to buy than a single GTX580. And it seems to me that they still are.

They would without a doubt be the best buy, if it was not because we are dealing with PC solutions, where one tech advance isn't automatically met by the industry as a whole. Just like Quadcores weren't necessarilly the best, because the industry didn't really care to take advantage of them.

That is also a fact.

Originally posted by Quizzical

Originally posted by Barbarbar

I'm sorry, but Quizz would never advise against SLI based on it using a 16 and an 8 slot. Or 2 8 slots. Sorry Quizz for stealing your thunder. Might want to type a new wall anyway ;). Short story is that an x8 has more than enough bandwith for a days day GPU.

The usual setup is that if a motherboard will have two PCI Express slots and say you can operate one at x16 bandwidth if you don't use the other, or operate both at x8 simultaneously.  My expectation is that as video cards get faster, they'll tend to need more PCI Express bandwidth.  That seems to be how it was historically.

Note also that PCI Express 3.0 x8 bandwidth is the same as PCI Express 2.0 x16 bandwidth.  If you've got PCI Express 3.0 everything, then x8/x8 isn't a problem.  I'd be less enthusiastic about putting two high end cards in SLI/CrossFire in a PCI Express 2.0 x8/x8 setup.

Also, the dependence on PCI Express bandwidth varies wildly from one game to the next.  In some games, the performance difference between PCI Express 2.0 x16 and x4 is basically a rounding error.  In others, there's a substantial (e.g., 10%) dropoff from x16 to x8.

This is all correct, but you are not telling anybody that the difference in performance between a x8 slot and a 16x slot will be less than 5%.

Are you saying that x8 bandwith will soon be too slow for modern GPUs? No, cause that's not the case so you don't say that. But you insinuate it instead.

Here's what I think Quizz. You are a good person and you have great knowledge on the subject which you speak of. But following these boards, it becomes clear that you go into every fight, and will use your expertise to win every joust you face. And as such, you actually end up contradicting yourself.

I read for example, one post where you advocated for AMD octacore solutions, based on future games and OS, and then in the next other people pointing to that solution where wherfed away by you as you were very onesided on an Intel duocore solution.

So. I think, that you should be aware, that your strength don't become your weakness.

I'm a Christian, so I say this, basically in the name of Jesus Christ.  I also said I was drunk. I am. I hope I don't get too much in the way of what I try to say. Don't let the devil turn your strength into a weakness, cause he will do it if he can.

Which is probably the way it should be. No power is real power unless it can fall as deep as it flies high.

FREEEDOOOMMM!!!