Crossfired HD 7950 vs a single HD 7970

mcross162 · Jun 13, 2013

So I've been running a 7950 for awhile now, OC at 1050/1500. It preforms great, but I'd like to get the best performance I can. (But still within my budget, no Titans..

)

So my question to you.. Is should I buy another 7950 and crossfire them, or sell my 7950 and purchase a 7970? It seems to me crossfired 7950's would be much better, but I'm curious to see your opinions.

My system specs:
Mobo: Biostar ta990fxe
RAM: G. Skill Sniper 8GB, 1866MHz
CPU: AMD FX-8350 clocked at 4.2GHz
PSU: 850W Corsair

Thanks in advance guys.

abCasPeRR · Jun 13, 2013

Yes 7950 crossfired would be better. But like most dual cards setups theres always the cons. Such as some developers not supporting multi card setups very well, some games will even run worse with 2 cards than 1. More heat and more power. IMO I would sell the 7950 and get a 7970ghz edition, and be set for a while, then if you want to. Crossfire those bad boys later on.

cuecuemore · Jun 13, 2013

Definitely the second 7950, the 7970 isn't nearly a big enough up to justify spending that much. It's a good card (I have two) but I'd say Crossfire or wait for the next gen at least.

sidp96 · Jun 13, 2013

I think you're best off buying another 7950 but know that crossfiring has its cons. Performance wise the dual 7950s will be the winner by a large margin.

17seconds · Jun 13, 2013

You need to study up on the problems with Crossfire. Until AMD fixes the frame latency issue, this is the reality of the situation:

AMD CrossFire Performance - A Bridge over Trouble Water?

Where AMD has definite issues is with HD 7970s in CrossFire, and our Frame Rating testing is bringing that to light in a startling fashion. In half of our tested games, the pair of Radeon HD 7970s in CrossFire showed no appreciable measured or observed increase in performance compared to a single HD 7970. I cannot overstate that point more precisely: our results showed that in Battlefield 3, Crysis 3 and Sleeping Dogs, adding in another $400+ Radeon HD 7970 did nothing to improve your gaming experience, and in some cases made it worse by introducing frame time variances that lead to stutter. Take a look at some of our graphs on those game pages and compare the FRAPS FPS result to the Observed FPS result that calculates an average frame rate per second after removing runts and drops. Clearly the performance of the dual-card configuration is only barely faster than the single card, removing the “scaling” of CrossFire.
http://www.pcper.com/reviews/Graphics-Cards/Frame-Rating-Dissected-Full-Details-Capture-based-Graphics-Performance-Tes-12

The issue of multi-GPU gaming on AMD crept up again with CrossFire - AMD's HD 7950s in a pair were consistently resulting in runt frames and dropped frames that caused lower observed frame rates than found with the GTX 660 Ti in SLI. In fact, it occurred more often here with the HD 7950s than it did with the HD 7970s - both DiRT 3 and Skyrim had problems in our review today when they did not appear to have any issues with the initial launch article. This tells me that as performance of the GPU is starting to go down (as we step down the product stack) the bottleneck of the GPU is going to cause more of these problems, not less. http://www.pcper.com/reviews/Graphics-Cards/Frame-Rating-GeForce-GTX-660-Ti-and-Radeon-HD-7950/Summary-and-Conclusions

mcross162 · Jun 13, 2013

Thanks for the feedback guys, I've decided against the crossfired 7950s because of the problems with it as matto17 showed. Now.. I'm considering saving up a little bit more to go to GTX 780. Do you think it's worth the extra $200 from at 7970? A 7970 being about $450 and a GTX 780 being $650. Is it worth it?

17seconds · Jun 13, 2013

mcross162 :

You could also consider the GTX 770 for around $400. Then there's also the GTX 760 coming out this month for $300 and faster than a GTX 670. A pair of those in SLI should really get the job done for $600.

Here's a look at the latest performance chart for your reference.

http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/ASUS/GeForce_GTX_780_Direct_Cu_II_OC/26.html

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Crossfired HD 7950 vs a single HD 7970

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