Your thoughts on crossfire on a P55 motherboard

[jamieuk23]

Is it worth it, compared to x58 ?

[nightkhaos]

No. You are pushing the limits of the PCIe chipset in the CPU on the P55 to run two cards in Crossfire. I recommend for multi GPU setups always trying to get an X58.

[shaithis]

If you dig around with goggle searches you will find many tests done on it.....IIRC it actually fared pretty well and the difference in performance would be fine in almost all cases.

[mac124]

dual x8 pcie slots loose something like 5-10% over dual x16 slots, whether its worth it is up to you, assuming you are going to gain 50%+ on your frame rate then it might be??

What card do you have now? You might be better off flogging it and getting a better single card.

[Blaineoliver]

5-10% is more like 5870/5850 crossfire, probably less on lesser cards.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

This article may prove useful to the OP:

http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/A...press_Scaling/

However nightkhaos has a poin about the Core i5 though. It maybe worth looking at a socket 1366 based build too if you are going for a higher end socket 1156 processor.

If you go the AMD route the 790FX is also worth a look as I have seen some AM2+ and AM3 ones for around £100 mark too

[Pob255]

The loss is not 10% as that artical shows, closer to 2%
It does depend heavly on what card you put in it.
Dual gpu cards are known to suffer more in x8 than single gpu cards as the two gpu's are shareing the single lane already.

The other major factor is that higher end cards generally get less benefit from sli/crossfire
However generally speaking while two mid to low range cards will get a better total % boost from sli/crossfire for the same cost you can generally get a single high end card that will perform better, or a cheaper card that will perform as well.

eg AFAIR two 4770's will perform around the level of a 4870 but for the same cost you can get a 4890 which would out perform them or a single 4870 for less than the cost of two 4770's

Of course two top end cards will give the best performance, just not twice the performance.