would a second 7970 be a big boost?

heero yuy

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Jul 25, 2010
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I currently have a sapphire AMD 7970 (not GHz edition) and I am thinking of getting a sapphire R9 280X toxic edition (I understand that the r9 280X is simply a 7970 GHz edition)

my motherboard is an asutek P8P67 PRO REV 3.1 (LGA1155) that has 3 PCI-e slots two are X16 (X8 dual mode) (I think that means when theres one card it runs at X16 mode but when theres two they run at X8 mode) the other I think is at X4 (I plan to put some cheap NVidia card into that for hybrid PhysX - just wondering would that cause anything to run at a slower speed?)

the other bits are 8GB corsair vengeance at 1600mhz and an intel 2500k at 4.7GHz

if it doesn't give much of a boost I shall buy a tigershark AX-1-0 for my tau army for use in escalation
 


There's a very, very small performance drop when going from 16x PCIe 2.0 to 8x PCIe 2.0, but it's no more than 1%-3%. This is easily offset by the fact that you'll be running two cards rather than one, so you should see gains of around 80% in games that support CrossfireX