Kaveri Crossfire Confusion

[Woodie]

So, the Kaveri APUs are here - and I've built a system using one. So far so good - I'm actually pretty impressed with the performance (the free copy of BF4 that came with, plays fine).

I'm trying to plan ahead though - and considering that the goal is a smaller, quiet system - the notion of a honking graphics card doesn't appeal to me. So that leaves Crossfire - still utilizing the APUs capabilities along side a less capable, lower power Graphics card. I'm given to understand that the Kaveri APU can only be paired with the R7 GPUs. That inspires a couple of questions:

Is it likely or even possible that AMD will eventually allow pairing of the APU with other GPUs? I ask because I see there are now two different R7 250 cards, based on different GPUs on the market. One uses the original "oland" GPU, and the other uses a "cape verde". Then there are the R7 260 and 265...

XFX and Sapphire both make fanless R7 250 cards... XFX is the older oland based with 384 stream processors, and Sapphires is the newer cape verde with 512 stream processors...

Any thoughts or additional information is appreciated!

 

[logainofhades]

The APU crossfired with a GPU doesn't always work so well. Since you don't want a big gpu, go with a GTX 750ti. Most do not require an external PCI-E connector. The r7 265 is still difficult to find.

 

[ohyouknow]

The other cards that are "tuned" with the 7850K are the 260X and Hawaii based 290's since they are considered GCN 1.1, but no support is there to DG as of right now if ever. It's odd that they are all GCN based but all the other cards in the line like the 265 etc. are highly unlikely to ever work with Kaveri.

In practicality, the 250's are all the same despite the numbers. The DDR3 version closely mirrors the kaveri chip itself since it uses DDR3 itself and more suitable to dual graphics while the GDDR5 is better as standalone. In practice, hardly distinguishable.