6950 Xfire question (eyefinity setup)

[darkgauntlett]

I've currently got a Sapphire 6950(2GB) running eyefinity at 5760 x 1080. It runs most of my games decently at medium high settings and i'm not having any issues. I want to upgrade to xfire in the next few months in preparation for BF3 and Skyrim though. My current mobo is x16/x4 so it needs to go and my PSU is a corsair tx650 so it needs to be replaced too. I have a core I5 750 processor so it's 1156. What would be my best bet in a motherboard? Do I need to upgrade to a whole new cpu/mobo combination (X58) or would something serve my purpose with my current cpu? How much power would I need to run this? 850w 1000W?

As the video card alone costs $275 i'd like to be cost conscious so my wife doesn't leave me. If I can keep my cpu i'd be happy but i'm not finding x16/x16 mobo's on the P55 chipset, which i read doesn't exist and doesn't matter much. What i'm worried about is it making a difference in eyefinity as it's triple the resolution. Would the extra bandwidth help and is it worth another few hundred bucks for a cpu?

 

[johnnyq8]

look mate you dont need to change anything at all
your cpu can handle everything without bottlenecking and the psu is good and the mobo can run the x-fire perfectly if you think that X16/x4 is issue its not your cards will run at X8/X8 so its good
good luck

 

[vvhocare5]

There have been a couple of other posts where the OP has a single 6950 and they struggle with Eyefinity. That is a lot of pixels to process and the 6950 is generally good for one monitor or Eyefinity at medium resolutions.

PSU will depend on what you do for CPU. I personally prefer at least a 750W PSU when xfiring but more depending upon what you do...

You dont really need 2 x 16 Pcie slots - Toms has shown that is not a limiting factor, so 2x8 works just fine (go read the test, it was pretty recent). That means you dont NEED X58 and it gives you options....

good luck

 

[johnnyq8]

i will agree with @vvhocare5 that you dont need x58 mobo but 650 watt will run it fine it can run the 5870 CF and the 5870 consume more power than 6950

 

[jyjjy]

As long as your PCI-E slots are 2.0 then you don't need to worry about the x4 slot. Here is an article from Techpowerup about PCI-E scaling on a GTX 480;
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/NVIDIA/GTX_480_PCI-Express_Scaling/24.html
So, while not ideal, a x4 slot should only limit the second card by about 5%.

 

[darkgauntlett]

Thank you guys. I've seen that there was no significant difference between x16(2) and x8(2) in single monitor set ups and a minor difference with x4. I tried xfire with two 6850's and performance dropped drastically in eyefinity even though single monitor performance saw a huge leap. I thought it was a bandwidth issue due to the +6 million pixels being produced and just upgraded the card to the 6950, returning the other two.

My understanding is that x4 is ok for single screen but a no no for eyefinity. I tried it with the 6850's and it was a no go... but have seen xfire and eyefinity work together.