Widescreen Gaming Forum

Well, the upper power envelope for the 5850 is 151w... which is 1w over what a single 6-pin and the PCI-E slot could deliver, power wise... an 8-pin delivers, what, 100w? I'm thinking the 5870X2 might be slightly downclocked compared to the single card 5870. Kinda like the GTX295 being a sort of half-way between two GTX260's and two GTX275s...

...maybe they'll call it the 5860X2, or something. :? :lol:

...maybe they'll call it the 5860X2, or something. :? :lol:

STOP talking sense when it comes to naming... it'll be the 7568x3.5 probably!

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Dipping bags at Mach1.9

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Bummer, gotta wait for the x2 then, thanks

The x2 also needs crossfire support to work. It seems the only way to have a 5870 crossfire + multi monitor gaming, now, is using the matrox triplehead2go, limited of course to 5040x1050. :wink:

Actually not really, Crossfire on the x2's work in a lower level invisible to the Operating System, thats how im able to run 3 monitors using SoftTh with a 4870x2 and a 3870.

When the 5870x2 comes out, we should be able to use EyeFinity on it with no problems.
not at all, ATI wants you to believe that, however X2's CF is exactly the same one as independent cards CF, the only difference being that on an X2 ATI CCC won't display the CrossFire panel (and you can still disable CF with tools such as "ATITool")
but this is just a strategy not a hardware difference or limitation at all !!!

edit: the strategy is aimed at users not even knowing that their card runs CF
ATI thinks a user don't have to know what is the underlying software, it should just run (however it doesn't prevent a few issues here and there)
I own an x2 card myself and I gain almost 50% when crossfire is enabled on some "crossfire un-supported" games. That same game(vanguard) doesn't see any gain at all from running 2 individual cards in crossfire. The truth is, the crossfire on X2 cards are hardware based, whereas individual cards are not. And I can disable crossfire just fine on mine if I want, it's called "Catalyst AI". Not sure where you get your info from, but I've experienced the opposite of what you claim.

I own an x2 card myself and I gain almost 50% when crossfire is enabled on some "crossfire un-supported" games. That same game(vanguard) doesn't see any gain at all from running 2 individual cards in crossfire. The truth is, the crossfire on X2 cards are hardware based, whereas individual cards are not. And I can disable crossfire just fine on mine if I want, it's called "Catalyst AI". Not sure where you get your info from, but I've experienced the opposite of what you claim.

disabling catalyst AI is very rough
let's say a game got two catalyst AI improvements, a general optimization + a CF profile, by disabling catalyst AI you disable both ...


Not sure what you meant by hardware based... it's not really THAT based on hardware since you still need a bunch of CPU power for the multi GPU overhead, though there's an additional bidirectional link (on 4870X2) between GPUs in addition to the normal PCI-E link... so yeah there is differences of implementation sometimes on some X2 cards.
however this does not change the fact that games need CF profiles for an X2 to work, the fact that an X2 works with some games while two of the single GPU card don't, only means that different profiles are needed.

Rereading what I said in your quote, it seems my words were a bit excessive and beyond my thoughts since it depends on which X2 we talk about. :roll: (@ myself)

Hey Ibrin? Why didn't we get a card? we got invited to the opening but no card?

I demand complaining to ATI to commence!

Don't worry - personally, I conly became aware of this forum after someone posted a link to it in some Eyefinity discussions. I after that there's no way we couldn't get a card here... :D