Can you crossfire duel 5830's with a 5970?

No. A 59xx series card has to be Crossfired with another 59xx series. 58xx with a 58xx ect.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_CrossFireX

I know for sure it is possible to crossfire a 5970 with a 58xx i was just wondering if you were able to do it with 2 of them. Specifically in this case 2 5830's.

if you have crossfire connectors, a strong psu, case, mobo, cpu - you can cfx 5830 with 5970. 5830 can be cfx with 5970 because it has two 58xx series (forgot which exact ones  ) gpus. the whole combo would run at 5830 speed.
check the compatibility list here:
http://sites.amd.com/us/game/technology/Pages/crossfire...
http://sites.amd.com/PublishingImages/Public/Graphic_Il...
i see that the 5970+5830 is not marked 'recommended', however it is possible.
web search for that cfx combo in case it loses too much performance with 5830, it won't be worth the combo.

News to me. I thought they had to be the same series. I did not think a 59xx would work with a 58xx. Also I'm pretty sure Crossfire scales to the slowest card.

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/245454-33-crossfire-f...

Oh I see why. Learn something everyday.  

The 5970 is basically two 5850s on a single board. So in theory, adding another 5850 would give you tri-fired 5850s, while adding a 5830 would give you tri-fired 5830s.

So in essence, by adding a 5830 you would be taking two small steps back and one big step forward.

I wouldn't bother.

Edit: The pixel rate of a single 5850 dwarfs that of a 5830, so I wouldn't dare add a 5830 if I were you. You probably wouldn't gain anything in high resolution gaming - and you may actually do worse.

Radeon HD 5850 23200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5830 12800 Mpixels/sec

http://www.hwcompare.com/13/radeon-hd-5830-vs-radeon-hd...

well,actually its a mix of both:

Quote:
As you can see, the Radeon HD 5970 offers roughly double the performance of a Radeon HD 5850. What you'll notice, however, is that that 5970 is somewhat of a mix between the 5850 and 5870. All of the stream processors (1600) in each GPU are enabled in the Radeon HD 5970, hence it has double the total number of the Radeon HD 5870 (3200). The Radeon HD 5970's clock speeds, however, are in-line with the Radeon HD 5850. We're told it's the mixing of 5800 series specifications that resulted in the new naming convention for the Radeon HD 5970--it's not quite a 5850 X2 or a 5870 X2, so in an attempt to avoid confusion, AMD gave the card a name that should convey the message that the 5970 is the highest performer of the three
end quote.

They couldnt run it a 5870 speeds due to keeping them under 300watts.

But i would also agree,it probably would not be worth doing.

Wow, thanks.