P5Q Pro XFire

[KxK]

I have a P5Q Pro board and i'm going to upgrade my graphics card at end of the month, settled on a 4870.

However i was thinking of 4850 XFire as it gets pretty good FPS etc...however even though the P5Q Pro has 2 x PCI-E 2.0 16x they go to 8x when with dual GPU, so isn't that just the same as one 16x card? :S

 

[spathotan]

I ran my two 4850's in Crossfire on my P5Q pro before I sold them for this 4870. I was getting "the same" graphics scores (not overall since I dont have a the proc they use in benches which is like a QX6700 or whatever) as these benches out there were. 8x/8x is fine for the 4850. But I wouldnt bother with something like two 4870's or X2's. My scores were only like 120 lower than the 16x/16x scores. The difference between 8/8 and 16/16 is like 1-3 FPS.

 

[KxK]

Ahh thanks.

So whats better, 2x 4850 in Xfire or 1x4870?

 

[spathotan]

Well the two 4850's are better of course. But the heat from them was just absurd, the bottom and bottom sides of my case were getting incredibly hot, they were running a rough 10c hotter than my 4870 does now. My cpu and NB temps were going up and up and up. The fans were louder, and I was over paranoid of potential power issues but thats wasnt a true issue. Anyways the biggest problem for me was the heat and the noise.