7950 crossfire, yay or nay?

ruskininja

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Oct 26, 2012
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I've been thinking of adding another Sapphire Radeon HD 7950 to my build, but I have a couple concerns. First of all, a lot of threads that I've been looking at say that the 7950 has abysmal crossifire performance and often doesn't have any performance gains. These are mostly nearly year old threads however, so I'm not sure if the drivers have fixed that issue or not. Also, I have a Raidmanx RX-850AE 850W Gold+ PSU. I know about their track record as of now, but when I built the PC, I didn't have that information. I only bought based off the 170+ glowing reviews. Here's the Newegg page for that. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817152043&nm_mc=AFC-C8Junction&cm_mmc=AFC-C8Junction-_-na-_-na-_-na&cm_sp=&AID=10446076&PID=3938566&SID= Should I go ahead and get a second card since they're selling so cheaply, or should I wait until I have $400 to spare on a R9 290? Obviously a single card has less issues, but if I can pick up a 7950 for $150 and have it perform well, why not?
 
Solution
For 150 bucks the performance gain would be worth it.

It does scale poorly and adds much more heat, but it is worth it for that price. If your motherboard and CPU can support it go for it, as it will hold you over until you can get a much more powerful single card setup.

hybird9012

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Jan 29, 2013
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I actually had the same PSU. I haven't had any problems with it for a year but was nervous about the reviews after I found out. So I bought a new PSU and I don't obviously notice any difference except peace of mind. I bought a Corsair RM 750.

As for your crossfire question, I've been an AMD fan my entire life and still have an AMD 8350 processor. I use to have an AMD 7950 (the card that you have). I was a little annoyed with heat issues from both AMD's CPUs and GPUs. That being said, my AMD 7950 started to heat up out of nowhere, even with a beefy 3rd party GPU cooler with a backplate. I have built 30+ computers over the past 15 years so I have experience and understand how to deal with thermal problems. This one was beyond me and I suspected it was the card's end of life - (I was also getting a lot of glitchy textures in games, etc.. and a few artifacts every now and then which cued me). Since I didn't want to put down $300-$400 for a card, I bought the Nvidia 750 Ti. Now the performance of the 750 Ti can't match the 7950 but I am amazed how stable it is and how extremely cool the card runs!!

As of now, after being an AMD fan for most of my life, I will be switching to Intel and Nvidia. Much better products and driver support. All this being said, I'd say wait for the Nvidia GTX 800 series (based of the Maxwell architecture) to come out. They way it will be cheaper and run much cooler. Looking at just the 750 Ti performance, let me tell you that the Nvidia 800 line will blow the AMD 7950 out of the water in terms of performance and temperature.

Conclusion:
From my experience and from LinusTechTips, save your money and wait for a powerful single card solution and avoid crossfire/sli. Driver support for AMD is terrible (I know, being with them for 15 years - so don't hold your breath for crossfire driver support anyway).
 
For 150 bucks the performance gain would be worth it.

It does scale poorly and adds much more heat, but it is worth it for that price. If your motherboard and CPU can support it go for it, as it will hold you over until you can get a much more powerful single card setup.
 
Solution

ruskininja

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Oct 26, 2012
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Yeah, I know I'd prefer to have the better driver support from Nvidia, but I have a crossfire mobo that doesn't support sli. I can add another graphics card for super cheap at the moment, but I'm about to be in a place where I can't save $400 to spend on a graphics card. I have a car to fix, bout to start college. I just need to know if spending $150 will make me not regret my purchase. And yeah hybird9012, I'm in you exact same situation. Started as an AMD fanboy with FX-8350/Radeon HD 7950, but after building many PCs, I've seen the advantages of Intel Nvidia instead. Pure power and benchmark scores aren't the only things to consider when purchasing these parts.