Crossfire Question with X1950XT

[Ethereal_Dragon]

Well, with my new build (currently being shipped), the motherboard, GIGABYTE GA-X38-DQ6 supports Crossfire. I currently own a HIS Hightech H195XTQT256DVN-R Radeon X1950XT 256MB, which, per numerous sources supports Crossfire as well.

So, can anyone shed any light on what I would need to have crossfire run? At this point, I am interensted in the knowledge, not necessarly going to do it. If I have the funds, I might set up multi monitor display, and Crossfire would be useful at that point, but not sure.

I know that in earlier flavors of Crossfire, there would be a "cross fire edition" master card that you would need in order to enable crossfire, and then the other card would just be a normal card that supports crossfire. On the newer ones, I know that they use the crossfire bridge to bridge the cards together. My card doesn't have a bridge, so would I need to get a "crossfire master' card, or just another card that supports crossfire (preferrably an identical card I would imagine)?

 

[veg1992]

u just need another card, a power supply powerful enough, and a Crossfire bridge (coems with board unless u got an OEM board)

 

[Ethereal_Dragon]

This X1950XT doesn't support the bridge, similar to the earlier flavors of Crossfire, which just used the PCI Express BUS I believe, but I am honestly not familiar enough with the technology to say for sure. I previously felt that the performance increase wasn't justifiable for the price, so I never read up on it much. But given that monitor's and GPU's have nose-dived as far as prices are compared in recent years, it is more of an option now.

 

[NosBoost300]

your going to have to get a crossfire edition card

being a x1900 crossfire edition or x1950 crossfire edition... the 1950 crossfire edition will cost you an arm and leg because its an x1950xtx.. but you should be able to come across some x1900 crossfire editions for 200ish dollars on ebay

but be aware that they will both operate as the slower card

 

[veg1992]

but u can always overclock an XT to XTX Speeds really easily..

 

[ShaolinDreams]

if you getting an X38 mobo why crossfire them cards.

Sell it.

get a 3870.. then another when you got extra cash.

Youll be too busy drooling at your games be to bothered about waiting for another card to go multi-screen.

 

[NosBoost300]

but u can always overclock an XT to XTX Speeds really easily..

the xtx had ddr 4 ram and 512 mb

and lets not forget, you need the crossfire dongle

and that could be a good idea... sell off the x1950xt you have, and get a 3870.. or a gt.. just a thought though

but again, if you wanted multiple monitors, crossfires the way to go

 

[veg1992]

meh.. but its still less of a bottleneck than having a gddr4 and a gddr3 of two way different speed cards.. lol..

 

[ShaolinDreams]

i say that cos from looking at your specs. its your graphics card as the weakest link. go DX10

 

[Ethereal_Dragon]

Yeah, I know it is the weakest link, but the new build went a bit overbudget. The X1950XT is 'leftover' from my previous gaming rig (which is dead right now), so the X1950XT is more than sufficient for the games I play at this point..... Battlefield 2 and Rollercoaster Tycoon 3 would be the most demanding games I play. I might have Oblivion somewhere, but I can't remember. It might just be a demo. That, and I am using Windows XP 64bit, so again, DX10 just isn't needed, or able to be run (unless XP now has DX10 support that I don't know about).