Crossfire on Asus M5A97 R2.0

mossi · Apr 16, 2013

Has anyone tried a CrossfireX setup (16x/4x) on a Asus M5A97 R2.0?

If yes then can you please quantify what sort of performance increase did you see (if any)?

I know some people will recommend getting another card instead of crossfiring on this kind of setup but I'm just interested to see what other people got out of their rigs.

Many thanks!

manofchalk · Apr 16, 2013

Havent used that board nor a Crossfire setup before, but I know you will see no performance boost. Quite possibly a decrease in performance if you tried to Crossfire on that board.
You need at least a PCI-2 8x slot to not bottleneck graphics cards, below that and they will be limited by bandwidth. By running a card in the 4x slot in tandem with the top card, it reduces both card to an effective 4x bandwidth, limiting performance in a big way.
Best case scenario you spend double for no performance boost, worst case you spend double and end up with less than a single card.

mossi · Apr 16, 2013

So in other words crossfire 16x/4x doesn't work at all? why don't they leave it out altogether?

Sorry if it sounds like a stupid question, I'm just trying to understand

Wolfshadw · Apr 16, 2013

Oh Crossfire works on that board, just not very well. It's called marketing. Crossfire does work. Therefore it's one of the board's features and it's added to the marketing campaign.

-Wolf sends

manofchalk · Apr 16, 2013

It will work, however you wont get the result you want.
Notice how SLI isn't supported by the board, only Crossfire? Thats because Nvidia states that a pre-requisite for SLI is there must be at least 8x/8x slots. AMD on the other hand is fine with allowing people to use 1x and 4x slots to run their cards in Crossfire, but if you tried you will get less than stellar performance.

And anyway, assuming your running the 5850 I can see in your sig, you would be better off just getting a better single card.

Wolfshadw · Apr 16, 2013

Also, you can check out this page of Tom's Hardware PCI-E Scaling article which details the performance loss of an x16x4 Crossfire setup: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/pci-express-scaling-p67-chipset-gaming-performance,2887-10.html

-Wolf sends

mossi · Apr 16, 2013

Wolfshadw :

According to this article there is a 10% avg loss of performance for 16x/4x as opposed to 8x/8x or 16x/16x. So if there is a 20 fps difference you're missing 2-4 so to say worst case 5.

Well thanks anyway for the answers, i think that sums it up.

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