I'm looking at purchasing an asus 144hz monitor in the near future, in preparation for Battlefield 4.. I have a 7950oc running solo at present, and have my eye on a used second 7950oc which is going for a fairly good price, in order to increase my frames and make use of the monitor's 144hz. Of course I'd be looking at setting up a crossfire system, my problem is that my mainboard is a cheap MSI Z77A-G41 - having two 16x pcie ports albeit running at 3.0/2.0 respectively.
I've been reading that the performance hit of running the second card at 2.0 (4x) is around 15% - which I can live with I suppose, but having an i5 2500k I'm already concerned about micro-stuttering, is the clash of 4x/16x likely to accentuate this problem? Due to limitations in the MB design I will be limited to a CPU overclock of around 4.2ghz..
Purchasing the second 7950 at the reduced price will make it FAR more cost effective than selling the existing 7950 and buying a more powerful single card, and I'd rather (at this point) not go the route of throwing in a new motherboard if I can avoid it.. But will the final product of this build be useless for gaming, that is the question?
I've been reading that the performance hit of running the second card at 2.0 (4x) is around 15% - which I can live with I suppose, but having an i5 2500k I'm already concerned about micro-stuttering, is the clash of 4x/16x likely to accentuate this problem? Due to limitations in the MB design I will be limited to a CPU overclock of around 4.2ghz..
Purchasing the second 7950 at the reduced price will make it FAR more cost effective than selling the existing 7950 and buying a more powerful single card, and I'd rather (at this point) not go the route of throwing in a new motherboard if I can avoid it.. But will the final product of this build be useless for gaming, that is the question?