Is it worth buying 2nd Radeon 6970 for crossfire ?

[fslateef]

Hi,

I already have one Asus EAH6970 and planning to buy another 6970 (might be some other brand like sapphire).

My CPU is Phenom II X6 1090T (overclocked to 3.8GHz and CPU-NB to 2.6GHz), Motherboard is GA-990FXA-UD3, RAM is (4x2GB) DDR3 1600 CL7 and PSU is Thermaltake XT 775W (look at my signature for full system configuation). At the moment I have 24-inch 1080p/60Hz monitor and don't have plans to upgrade it anytime soon.

I like to play games with maximum details and settings possible (I don't care much about high fps like I am happy in playing with 35+ fps but getting more frames per second is ideal).

Now I have some questions:

-- Is it worth to buy another 6970 and do crossfire ? Especially for single monitor 1080p/60Hz ?
-- If I add another one then will my CPU @ 3.8GHz become bottleneck ?
-- If I go with another one then can I say that I will be good for next 2-years or more from GPU power point-of-view ?

Thanks in advance

 

[fslateef]

I have another question besides the ones asked above in first post:

-- After reading some forum posts I found that using Crossfire is a pain ? And you have to do specific configuration for every game separately ? Also the performance is not always good in every game ? If yes then at-least it will be equal to one card (not 2) ?

I hope you understand my reason for concerns as this will be the first time I am thinking about doing crossfire/sli and I have no knowledge about it

 

[Mousemonkey]

I have another question besides the ones asked above in first post:

-- After reading some forum posts I found that using Crossfire is a pain ? And you have to do specific configuration for every game separately ? Also the performance is not always good in every game ? If yes then at-least it will be equal to one card (not 2) ?

I hope you understand my reason for concerns as this will be the first time I am thinking about doing crossfire/sli and I have no knowledge about it

What you are considering is Crossfire not SLi and whilst similar in that more than one card is used they are not the same thing in terms of driver support and ease of use.

 

[fslateef]

Thanks for reply. I know it's crossfire for ATI cards was mentioning SLI just in terms of multiple graphics configuration.

From ease point of view it's very much cumbersome to do crossfire config and have to do this differently for every game ? I know there are profiles provided by AMD but are they covering almost all new games at least ?

Also it will be good if I can get answers to my questions in first post. As sometimes I think that I go for SSD rather than another 6970

 

[deathsim182]

I personally just put in another 6970 and do not regret it. Crossfire wasn't hard to set up at all and so far the only game I have that has had issues with it is Battlefield 3 (when I say issues I mean stuttering when I had none before). In all honesty though you really don't need a second card for what you want out of your rig, but if you do decide to go with another one, I have seen 40-70 fps increases in my benchmarks. Keep in mind as well that any issues may get better with future driver/game updates.

 

[fslateef]

Thanks deathsim182 for reply and suggestion. I haven't bought other 6970 yet as I also realized that with my current setup I don't need another graphics card as I am happy to play games at 1080p with full-details but with 30+fps; so increasing it to 60+fps is not worth spending that much.

Although I recently bought Passive 3D monitor and playing games in 3D is reducing fps almost by half. Thus 2nd card will be useful if I play games in 3D but I am not keen to play games in 3D (watching 3D movies is a completely different experience and I like it).

Also now I am waiting for Radeon HD 7000 series cards which are just around the corner.

Thanks again.

 

[fslateef]

Best answer selected by fslateef.