Crossfire Question

Wiiings12

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I have decided recently I would like to do a few upgrades. Starting with a graphics improvement. I would rather not throw away the 80 dollar HD 4830 I bought at the beginning of this year, but I can NOT find the same card anywhere. I can find other 4830's but they are from different manufacturers and have different clocks on them. Will these other cards work with my 4830 in crossfire mode?

I have also heard you can mix GPU's with ATI's crossfire (I haven't found any proof of this yet though) Maybe I could just get a 4850?
 

darkvine

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THey can be from different vendors that doesn't matter.

You can mix GPU's within the 4000 series. You can get a 4850 if you like and I would personally do that as it is a fer stronger card for only a little bit more money.
 

Wiiings12

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Allright, thanks!

Now, if I was to get a 4850 it would be downclocked severely because of me using it with a 4830, right? So technically paying for a 4850 would be a waste.. Although.. I could probably find one cheaper than a 4830 because they are quite scarce compared to the 4850's..
 

FallenSniper

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You might want to read up on Crossfire a little bit more. How I always thought it worked, the 4850 would run at full speed, and having the 4830 in crossfire just adds to the 4850s performance. There have been multiple generations of crossfire though, and I'm not sure if this has changed with the newest generation.

Anyways...I would definitely recommend buying a 4850 rather than buying another 4830
 

Wiiings12

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Ok, I am just going to buy another 4830, I would be wasting money on a 4850 because it IS downclocked to the 4830's speed.

Now I need to decide what size memory card to buy, I am leaning towards the 1gb, but I dont know if it will provide any real performance gain. ATI's site doesn't say anything else and I haven't seen anyone talking about it. What do you guys think? another 512, or get the 1 gb?

Also, I would like to try and keep an extra pci slot open, does anyone know of a good SMALL aftermarket heatsink I can put on one of these cards to make them take up less space? Don't want to spend a whole lot here, 35-40 bucks max.
 
You cant just add a 1gb card and have extra memory. Both cards need to keep an identical copy of the info that's on the other one as they are basically taking it in turns to draw parts of the same image so they both need to know the full picture. You will to all intents and purposes still only have 512mb of memory regardless of the other card having 1gb so you may as well just get another 512.

Mactronix