Can my Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3P handle 2x 5850 CrossfireX?

[AtomicPlayboyX]

I've got a single Radeon 5850 in my machine right now, and am contemplating adding another, for a XFire configuration. I can't find a chart from ATI/AMD which includes both the 5850 card and the P35 chipset which my motherboard (Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3P v2.0) uses. An older chart includes the P35, but only includes 4000-series cards, and the newer chart includes the 5000-series cards but doesn't include the P35 chipset.

So, does anyone have this configuration working with this specific motherboard?

I know that it is suboptimal, given that the motherboard doesn't have two full PCI-X 16 slots, but for the present time I'm not concerned about that, and I'm trying not to upgrade my motherboard. Also, are there any physical considerations? The full-size card doesn't look like it will fit very well in the second PCI-X slot, since it would overlap some of the SATA ports, but I'm disinclined to move the existing card to find out.

(I wasn't sure whether this post belonged in the mobo or gfx forum, but since it's more a question about a specific motherboard than a specific graphics card, I figured I'd go with the former.)

 

[pinkeyes]

I googled your mobo and found the old newegg spec sheet:

http://www.newegg.com/product/product.aspx?item=N82E16813128067

under expansion slots it lists your mobo as having:
PCI Express x16 2 PCI Express X16 slot(x16, x4)

and from what I can tell the p35 chipset only has PCIe 1.1
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_P35

From this, I'd deduce that putting a 5850 in a PCIe v1.1 @ 4x slot would see a fair amount of bottlenecking. =/

 

[AtomicPlayboyX]

Yeah, that's what I was referring to when I indicated that the mobo doesn't have two full PCI-X 16 slots, but for now I'm ready to take the performance hit. I'm mainly going to do the upgrade so that I can go Eyefinity for now, and will still get some small performance improvement from the second 5850, and then when I upgrade my whole core system (mobo, cpu, ram) down the line, I'll get the full advantage of the CrossfireX configuration. Alternatively, I could just spend $100 and get a DisplayPort/DVI dongle to do Eyefinity, but those are hard to find, and I may as well spend the extra $200 to get another card. So I'm really just looking to find someone who has actually put a pair of 5000-series cards in a GA-P35-DS3P motherboard successfully.

 

[pinkeyes]

By today's standards (when you read 16x/8x etc) the second slot is akin to a 2x slot because it's the older 1.1 PCIe version.

Idk, personally I wouldn't spend 300dollars just to allow eyefinity with minimal performance increase when by the time you do a full system upgrade the prices of the card could come down significantly.

You may have a hard time finding anyone who has built the setup you're thinking about, but who knows.

PS. Just a quick note PCI-X (while I understand what you're referring to) actually does not mean PCI Express. PCI-X is an older double wide PCI interface used in server applications.