Widescreen Gaming Forum

Hello Forum.
I'm currently planning to build a new computer. And my eyes has landed on the two 6850s. Since I already own 3 24inch monitors, my plan is to run two monitors on one of the cards and one monitor on the other one. Since I want to Crossfire the two cards and be able to do excessive gaming :D on my Computer. So is this possible? Crossfire two 6850s and be able to play on 3 monitors.

Feel free to add any comments( like headsups and common problems with these setup)

It works, it's just that it can be a little buggy at times. But when it works, it works great. ;)

Well I'm considering getting another 5870 E6 card (can be hard cheaply now). Should I go that route, or just sell what I have and go 6970 when an E6 version pops up? (5x1 P is one of my goals)

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System Core: | Intel Core i5-2500K + ASUS P8Z68-V + 16GB Corsair XMS3 DDR3 1333 MHz | Win7 x64 | MSI R7970 Lightning 3GB [1105/1400] |
Display: | 3 x Dell Ultrasharp 3007WFP-HC @ 7680x1600 | Dell u3011 |

Personally I do not see the 6970 being an upgrade to the 5870 its just marginally better.

If you were building a new system the 6970 would be the way to go for heat & power consumption reasons.


As for adding another 5870 for CF. Thats subjective. You cant expect 2x the performance as it may not work well or at all with some games, however there are cases where it does almost double the performance. You just have to ask yourself is it worth it? Do you need the performance boost? Is your PC up to running 2 of the GPUs? (cooling, power demand, and also does your mobo support 2x 16x PCI-e at the same time in CF?)

For me it was not worth the 2nd card. I had dual 4850's and gladly "upgraded" to a single 5870, performance was about the same but just having one card was so nice, less bugs/issues, less power and less heat in my room.

I am holding out for what ever card comes next that truly is the successor to the 5870 as a single card powerhouse, also will make sure it has 2GB vRAM.

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I have an xfire eyefinity setup and my roommate has a SLI surround setup.

Reviews and benchmarks will show great scaling (even in triple wide) for select games.

What they don't show you is just how many games dual GPU setups flat out don't work in. I'm not saying the game won't run on a dual GPU setup, but more often than not, the scaling is very poor or doesn't exist. In these cases, a single card is almost always smoother. Worst case scenario, there's negative scaling and the game literally becomes unplayable since negative scaling usually means massive stuttering as well.

In some cases, the game won't even run with multi-gpu's (this is the rarest case). For example, my roommate can't play mirror's edge in surround since it just doesn't want to behave with SLI.

For me, I can turn xfire off when I see that clearly the game doesn't take advantage of it and a single card would offer a smoother experience. I find that I have to do this more often than not for a vast array of games that simply never show up in benchmarks and reviews.

Bottom line is that nvidia and ATI make damn sure that scaling works well for the select games that often appear in reviews or big name titles. If those are the games you play, then go for it. Otherwise, I'd think twice. Personally I play a lot of more obscure games and more often than not, I end up unchecking that xfire box in CCC.