Any games out now (or soon) that would benefit from more than one 5850? (1920x1200)

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Daggah

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OK, so I'm almost done with my deployment, so that means I've got a decent amount of money in my bank account with which to fund a new build. Right now I've got an Intel Q6600 with a mild overclock, 4 GB of RAM, and an ATI 5850. The build I'm looking at is:

Intel i7 930
ASUS X58M motherboard
6 GB of DDR3

And I'm wondering how much benefit, if any, I'd get from getting a second 5850 and running the two cards in Crossfire. Is it worth the extra money? I have one 24" 1920x1200 monitor.
 
Unfortunately Crossfire isn't working too well right now, but if you wait until the new cards come out you can pick one up for cheaper and not worry about it too much.
 
I would wait for information on the next generation coming out in mere days then decide.

From early indicators the 6850 or 6870 seems a bit of a sidegrade to what you already have, though. But the 6950 due out next month could be a much better option than buying a second 5850, especially if you only play at 1920x1200 on a single screen. If you were playing on multiple screens with a much higher resolution, then maybe Xfire would be good.

Xfire is awesome when it works as intended but that is unfortunately not always the case. However if you still want to give it a try then grab a 5850 when prices are slashed on existing hardware after the new release.
 
While AMD is the king of single card, if you take a gander at the videocard section most of the recent reviews show crossfire is still hit and miss.
 
piscian18 said:
While AMD is the king of single card, if you take a gander at the videocard section most of the recent reviews show crossfire is still hit and miss.
Click to expand...

Yea it is, just loaded up Blur last night. I originally played it one card, before I got my second 5850. It's unplayable with crossfire, have to go back to a single card. :(

Depends on the game.
 
Crossfire for the most part works fine, the amount of additional FPS you get differs from game to game, some are closer to that magical +100% scaling than others. There is a fair bit of moaning about this right now but generally speaking it's not worse than it's ever been, crossfire is a more specialist configuration and you have to understand it will have a few more problems than a single card system.

Whether or not I'd recommend it for you is another matter, only a few games right now are going to push that card at 1920x1200, the PC gaming platform isn't really seeing much in the way of new titles pushing the cards due to all the multi-platform development causing lowest common denominator development.
 
Thanks, it sounds like I'll just save myself the money and stick with the one 5850.
 
For the most part, a 5850 can more than handle a single 1920*1200 monitor. Only a few games will require you to turn down any settings. If you overclock that 5850(and they do clock well), you'll have even less to worry about.
 
1. Get the i7 950 instead
2. Get an SSD
3. Don't upgrade your GPU just yet
 
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