Planning crossfire for my current rig to do triple monitor gaming

dazy91 · Nov 1, 2014

I'm looking to crossfire my rig and have a few questions.

This is my current rig: i5-4670, R9-290(reference), 2x4GB kingston(can't remember what speed), CX600M(I know i need to get a better PSU) and a H87-plus.

My plan is also to upgrade my CPU since i think the 4670 bottlenecks one 290 anyway, would the 4690k suffice for x2 290's? and which would be a good CPU cooler for a slight OC?

Would this motherboard do the trick

Since the reference 290's seem to be expensive as new, can i get a different model to mine and which would be best if i can?

I've read to get the best performance from crossfire is to have 2x 3.0 x16 PCIe slots on a motherboard, but those seem expensive. The motherboard i linked says in 2 way cross fire it would become 2x x8 PCIe, will that impact the performance greatly rather than getting a 2x 16x PCIe motherboard?

Thanks.

NiCoM · Nov 1, 2014

First off i wouldn't make that CPU upgrade, it's a too little upgrade to be worth it.
Using cpubenchmark.net, which gives an overall score from multiple benchmarks.
Your current CPU scores ~7.400
Your planned upgrade: ~7.750

And with only a slight overclock, you won't get far from your current CPU's score, so i would say it's not worth it.
Your current CPU should defently do the job in any title i would say, most people say that "any haswell I5 will be sufficient for gaming". And I personally is using the "K" version, actually been running it stock speeds for a while, and a R9 290 from ASUS. I've been playing Battlefield 4, Starcraft II and other CPU heavy games no problem.

One thing to think about when crossfiring this stock cooler, unless you have very good airflow, you'll probably bump into problems like thermal throttling, which will lower the performance and cause fps drops.

No matter which mobo you're going for, you'll only have x8 in CFX on socket 1150. It doesn't have enough total PCI-E lanes to support double x16. Might have two x16 but that just means you can run one card in x16 in the bottom slot too.
And you won't see any bottlenecks because of this, you could probably run x4 with no problems too.

Hope this helped!

dazy91 · Nov 1, 2014

NiCoM :

First off i wouldn't make that CPU upgrade, it's a too little upgrade to be worth it.
Using cpubenchmark.net, which gives an overall score from multiple benchmarks.
Your current CPU scores ~7.400
Your planned upgrade: ~7.750

And with only a slight overclock, you won't get far from your current CPU's score, so i would say it's not worth it.
Your current CPU should defently do the job in any title i would say, most people say that "any haswell I5 will be sufficient for gaming". And I personally is using the "K" version, actually been running it stock speeds for a while, and a R9 290 from ASUS. I've been playing Battlefield 4, Starcraft II and other CPU heavy games no problem.

One thing to think about when crossfiring this stock cooler, unless you have very good airflow, you'll probably bump into problems like thermal throttling, which will lower the performance and cause fps drops.

No matter which mobo you're going for, you'll only have x8 in CFX on socket 1150. It doesn't have enough total PCI-E lanes to support double x16. Might have two x16 but that just means you can run one card in x16 in the bottom slot too.
And you won't see any bottlenecks because of this, you could probably run x4 with no problems too.

Hope this helped!

With the reference and probably the Tri-x one i might be getting. I'll stick the reference card on the bottom slot and have a 120mm fan on the bottom to hopefully avoid the throttling.

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Planning crossfire for my current rig to do triple monitor gaming

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