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Thread: Is there such thing as Asynchronous Crossfire?

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    Is there such thing as Asynchronous Crossfire?

    For instance, is it possible to run a 4870 with a 4850 and get performance between a 4870x2 and 4850x2?

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    Re: Is there such thing as Asynchronous Crossfire?

    simple answer to this, no.

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    Does he need a reason? Funkstar's Avatar
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    Re: Is there such thing as Asynchronous Crossfire?

    Though there was some tech that got a lot of coverage last year that would enable this. In theory, the guys behind it said they could use any combination of GPUs going back several generations.

    I can't see it being a commercial success though, too much pressure from the main players.

    So as Matty said, you can't use a 4870 and a 4850 in crossfire, but you can use them in multi-monitor mode to give you up to 4 screens as they use the same driver pack so Windows will allow that.

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    Re: Is there such thing as Asynchronous Crossfire?

    Umm as far as I remember, Yes you can.

    Unlike SLi you can run two different card in crossfire, I seem to remember that it limits the faster card to the speed of the slow though. ie you'd end up with a 4850 crossfire setup.

    Crossfire has always been less picky about card make and model.


    EDIT: but I'd double check before you go and buy a new card, just incase, my info about this is rather out of date.

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    Re: Is there such thing as Asynchronous Crossfire?

    The HD 3850 and 3870s could be crossfired together. Apparently you still can with the 4800s too looking at a Google search. But yeah, I'd imagine the 4870 is clocked down to the 4850 speed - the difference between 2x4850 and 1x4850+1x4870 is next to nothing.

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    Re: Is there such thing as Asynchronous Crossfire?

    Thanks. Ah well, I found out that my motherboard isn't a proper crossfire motherboard anyway (one of the PCIe is only 4x). I think the idea could sell pretty well if they can make it work in the future though (and I don't mean by diminishing one card to match the other ).

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    Re: Is there such thing as Asynchronous Crossfire?

    Basically you can crossfire together any cards in the same series so you can put a 4870 and a 4830 together if you want to but both cards default to the lowest common speed so your 4870 would effectively become a 4830 (in this example) and performance would be the same as 2x 4830's in crossfire. The only advantage you could possible gain from this scenario is that if the was a game which actually had a performance hit from running in crossfire (or just didn't get much of a boost) you could disable crossfire and run on the 4870 rather than in crossfire at 4830 speeds. The are not many games to which this applies now though as crossfire support has become quite robust.

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    Re: Is there such thing as Asynchronous Crossfire?

    Yeah, it's not too exciting IMO (quite limited use). We've seen SLi and Crossfire improve quite a lot since it was re-introduced post 3DFX. I reckon that true asynchronous SLI/Crossfire on the other hand can potentially sell quite well if they somehow manages it.

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    Re: Is there such thing as Asynchronous Crossfire?

    +1 to everyone saying you can do this but it's not worth it

    The only situation I can envisage where it'd make sense to do this is if you have a 48x0 already, and you can pick a second up for next to nothing (friend getting rid of old card / lucky ebay purchase?). I certainly don't think it's worth buying 2 retail cards for it.

    Your 4x PCI-e slot should still support crossfire, I think - but obviously that card will be slightly communication starved. However, I believe speculation alert in many games this wouldn't be that important as the PCI-e bus is not the major performance barrier. Pure speculation, but you could always google it

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    Re: Is there such thing as Asynchronous Crossfire?

    x4 bandwidth is a little restrictive esp for higher end cards.
    My guess is you'd not lose performance running a 4830 at x4, a 4850 or 4870 would take a more noticeable hit, how big a hit? I'm not sure.

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    Re: Is there such thing as Asynchronous Crossfire?

    On nVidia's side, how powerful of a card do you think I can go for before the x4 bandwidth becomes an issue? I don't think it would make much sense to crossfire anything less than a 4850, but I wonder if it might be possible to have a 4850 and a 9800+ for PhysX later on.

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    Re: Is there such thing as Asynchronous Crossfire?

    Why not just buy a physx card, I know they don't sell them new anymore, but you can pick one up fairly cheap on ebay
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    Re: Is there such thing as Asynchronous Crossfire?

    Quote Originally Posted by TooNice View Post
    On nVidia's side, how powerful of a card do you think I can go for before the x4 bandwidth becomes an issue? I don't think it would make much sense to crossfire anything less than a 4850, but I wonder if it might be possible to have a 4850 and a 9800+ for PhysX later on.
    running ATi and nVidia in the same machine is gonna present you with all kinds of driver conflicts and most likely endless problems

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    Re: Is there such thing as Asynchronous Crossfire?

    The x4 speed doesnt actually slow down the card more than 3 fps typically. And Yes you can run asyncrinous, it would have been better if people had googled before assuming the answer.

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