Crossfire with x16 and x4 pci-e slots?

[ninelivesproductions]

Im sorry, I posted this once before and I didnt realize that my MOBO has an x4 not an x8
pci-e slot.

So Im guessing that its possible but I'm going to take a huge performance hit.

What do you guys think?

 

[ninelivesproductions]

So if I drop another 170 later down the road (A couple Years) or whatever it would cost then would it be a waste?

Would I be better off buying a completely new video card (Maybe moving the 5770 down to the x4 slot) in the future and crossfiring with that?

 

[ninelivesproductions]

Well, screw that if its going to bring the 16x slotted card down with it.

 

[ninelivesproductions]

Best answer selected by Ninelivesproductions.

 

[jyjjy]

The performance hit is much larger than 5-10% from what I've read. Basically from the numbers I've seen you should forget about crossfire with a second slot at x4.

 

[jyjjy]

Here is an old article on the subject that concludes that x4 simply isn't enough;
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/pci-express-scaling-analysis,1572.html
These days cards use even more bandwidth so I'm sure it is only worse now.

 

[jyjjy]

The 480 is ~10% worse on X4 than X16, so Id suppose that crossfire with 2 lower powered cards wont be much different.

Where did you actually see those numbers? I thought for a board to even be licensed as SLI it needed to be at least x8/x8

 

[omid76]

The performance hit is much larger than 5-10% from what I've read. Basically from the numbers I've seen you should forget about crossfire with a second slot at x4.

Sad but true!

I learned this the hard way, bought a 970 mobo for my 8350.(always take the time to do your homework, there is no rush!)

Single gpu will do better on 970 board vs CF
I had to take out my second gpu 7950 to be able to use the first one to its 100% and with the CF it was all choppy. that was just false advertisement I say, it shouldn't say crossfire on the box even!