Hybrid Crossfire?

[deejayburnout]

Just been looking at a email I got from Overclockers and is was selling a budget mobo with hybrid crossfire capabilities on it and after a little googling I get the rough idea that....

If I had a AMD APU, I could crossfire it with my HD 7850 and get more graphic ompfhhh.

Or

If the mobo had onboard AMD graphics, I could crossfire It with my HD 7850 and get more graphic ompfhhh

Or if I had a AMD APU and a onboard AMD graphics and my HD 7850 I could melt my eyeballs.

Is this the case and does anyone use this type of crossfire?

Is it any good?

Very interested as will be getting a new mobo in a few months and this might make me change my choices.

[scaryjim]

lol, what motherboard?

First, forget about your 7850. It won't work in hybrid crossfire or dual graphics at all - and tbh there wouldn't be any improvement even if it did.

If it's an AM3 motherboard with onboard graphics, then you can combine a low-end 2000-4000 series graphics card with the onboard graphics to get some additional graphical performance. I've actually got a GDDR3 3470 kicking around that I picked up specifically to test hybrid crossfire with ... but never got round to doing it! Bottom line though; onboard graphics + a 3470 is going to be slower than pretty much any discrete graphics of the last 3 years - even a £20 5450 should be faster.

If it's an FM1 or FM2 motherboard, then it's talking about Dual Graphics (the same thing but with an APU rather than a motherboard IGP), where you can use a low-to-mid-range card like a 5670/6570/6670 in crossfire with the GPU in the APU to boost frame rates. Dual Graphics is good when it works well, but doesn't always work: for instance, it's DX10+ only, so any game that's DX9 only won't benefit. But even pairing something like an A10-5800k with a HD6670 isn't going to outperform a proper discrete card like a 7850.

So in your situation: ignore it

[deejayburnout]

This was the mobo I was looking at. The crossfire caught my eye, not a mobo I would actually buy

[RichieLee]

Be aware that that board doesn't support sata 3, I didn't notice this when speccing my build and my ssds are running at sata 2 @ 3GB/s. Having said that it's still plenty quick enough.

[Willzzz]

It's just like scaryjim says, won't work with 7850, the cards it does work with are way worse than a 7850.

[deejayburnout]

Thanks for the info scaryjim.

The concept is a good idea but in practise I can imagine it is a pain in the ass.

At least that is all cleared up now.

The mobo is defo one I wouldn't buy, not enough expansion on it and lacking fan headers.

[scaryjim]

It's basically a £35 motherboard with a USB3 chip stuck on it, and you're paying the full mark up for the USB3. Any 760G motherboard should support hybrid crossfire, but checking the AMD pages it looks like it'll only work with a 3450 anyway - and performance will suck, regardless (here's Hexus' look at Hybrid Crossfire when it originally made its entrance on 780G). Besides, you can get 760G boards with USB3 for a lot less...

Actually, I'd not reread that review for ages. I'm definitely going to have to rig up my hybrid crossfire setup and do some testing - scaling isn't horrid in DX9 games,and giving a DDR3 3470 a bit of extra help - particularly on an AM3 platform with both sideport and decent DDR3 memory - could be very interesting. Might have to test it against my 3670k and see how close a tweaked and optimised HD4200 can get...

[jiw2003]

I heard that Hybrid crossfire is worse than your discreet graphics card on its own. Apparently it's a bottle necking issue. Unless you're planning on adding a really naff discreet card then you will slow down your system. Linus on Linus tech Tips on Youtube tested this and found it to be true (i cannot find the link though)

In fact, i understand AMD have dropped this feature as Microsoft said it has stability issues with Windows 7 (Not sure for 8)

[KeyboardDemon]

There are a narrow band of AMD/ATI GPUs that will work with the integrated GPU on the mobo/CPU, these would usually be something that's around the same performance level of the integrated graphics. As has been pointed out, the 7850 won't work simply because it is way too powerful for the integrated options and would end up being throttled if you tried to use this in a Hybrid Crossfire setup.