Reviews - Double trouble: Sapphire Radeon HD 5770 in CrossFireX

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What do you get when you place two Radeon HD 5770s in CrossFireX? Read on to find out.

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Read more.

i am really hoping some people buy these cards so i can pick up a second gtx 260 cheap and do SLI with it

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Originally Posted by hexus

Muddying the performance projections a touch, the combined 2,048MB frame-buffer may well help the two HD 5770s at ultra-high resolutions.

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What's more, if you need it, the two HD 5770 cards offer a combined 2,048MB frame-buffer.

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Um, how?

That's me being lazy with language, based on ATI using SFR for CrossFireX, where each card's draws 50 per cent of the screen, tapping into its own frame buffer.

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Originally Posted by Tarinder

That's me being lazy with language, based on ATI using SFR for CrossFireX, where each card's draws 50 per cent of the screen, tapping into its own frame buffer.

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But each frame buffer has to store the full render portion, even if it's only doing calculations on half of it.

Unless you're saying there's a new architecture where cards can use the other card's framebuffer with no delay? That would be a world first and I'm surprised Hexus would be the only one to spot it.

Otherwise the framebuffer is the same as when you have a single card, ie, 1024mb, and won't help at higher resolutions.

Nice.. the question is, is the loss of a PCI-e slot, game compatibility issues, more noise, higher thermals and 40W extra power on load worth it..

On first thoughts I'd say 'no', but I am looking at four monitor compatibility (unless I decommision one of my existing three), and you'd better hope that the Eyefinity six comes out at a reasonable price otherwise the price disparity will be huge.

PK

I think the big issue always with this is the fact that you lose your ability to "go crossfire" later on.

In this instance, you can sacrifice a bit of performance (and save a few quid) and go for the 5850, and then if in 12 months you want a bit more grunt you can pick up a second (now cheaper) 5850. Alternatively, with the crossfire solution you're effectively tying yourself in, giving yourself no room to maneouvre - in my opinion that's something that you just can't ignore.

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Originally Posted by danroyle

i am really hoping some people buy these cards so i can pick up a second gtx 260 cheap and do SLI with it

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Better look quick. Cos apparently NV is EOLing alot of the "big" cards. With the price pressure from AMD/ATI they have to sell cards at a loss.

any chane of a multi monitor set up? Can we run any games on three monitors yet?

HAWX? Flight sim on three screens.... /sighs...

heaven

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Originally Posted by snootyjim

I think the big issue always with this is the fact that you lose your ability to "go crossfire" later on.

In this instance, you can sacrifice a bit of performance (and save a few quid) and go for the 5850, and then if in 12 months you want a bit more grunt you can pick up a second (now cheaper) 5850. Alternatively, with the crossfire solution you're effectively tying yourself in, giving yourself no room to maneouvre - in my opinion that's something that you just can't ignore.

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Assuming you only have two PCI-E slots you mean?

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Originally Posted by Zak33

any chane of a multi monitor set up? Can we run any games on three monitors yet?

HAWX? Flight sim on three screens.... /sighs...

heaven

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http://www.hardocp.com Scroll down to the Eyefinity overview.

And if u go look at their 5xxx coverage they explain more.

http://www.viddler.com/explore/HardOCP/videos/49/

That shows it off the best. The video showing Eyefinity off. He misspeaks a few times. He says 5770 but its the 5870 he's reviewing.

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Originally Posted by snootyjim

I think the big issue always with this is the fact that you lose your ability to "go crossfire" later on.

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Hey peeps, I'm new to the forums but been reading them for quite a while. Thanks for a most interesting discussion.

Brand-4-brand The Sapphire HD 5770 is going for £131.99 @ ebuyer.com (x2 = £263.98), whilst a single Sapphire HD 5870 is going for £272.54 @ Kikatek.com

Is the single HD 5870 worth the £10 difference? I would most certainly think so.:cool:

It will be interesting to see how this argument fair when companies start to slash the prices down more.

That aside: here is a question that's been nagging me: how would a HD 5770 Crossfire fair in a P55 chipset enviroment? Now, I already read in some reviews that the difference is negligible between an X58 (which serves 2 x16) and the P55 (which splits x16 into x8/x8) when running crossfire; but with the margin already quite tight between a single card configuration and crossfire as we've seen in this review, would the x16 split be the bottleneck?

Any reviews on that?

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Originally Posted by kalniel

Assuming you only have two PCI-E slots you mean?

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Well, of course. I'm just going off the basis that 2 graphics-card suitable PCI-E slot boards are far more common than 3 or 4 slot boards... although, I'd have to wonder whether even with more slots a quad-crossfire 5770 solution would be worthwhile. That recent build on Tom's Hardware that used four 4850s was a joke!

very intriguing article, i'm wondering though (in reference to needing more grunt down the line if you go xfire now) what will you be needing more grunt for ? these run at very acceptable fps at 2560x1600, and my reasoning is if you can afford to drop a grand on a monitor you're not gonna worry about pairing up 2 'budget' gfx cards

one of these runs fine at 1920x1200, probably the most common resolution for the enthusiast gamer, so having 2 will give at least 3 years of max settings on anything new

also we're not yet seeing the true potential of these cards as all the new bells and whistles they're clanging about aren't being used yet..gotta wait for a game to push dx11 stuff and see how they perform then :D

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Originally Posted by Tunnah

very intriguing article, i'm wondering though (in reference to needing more grunt down the line if you go xfire now) what will you be needing more grunt for ? these run at very acceptable fps at 2560x1600, and my reasoning is if you can afford to drop a grand on a monitor you're not gonna worry about pairing up 2 'budget' gfx cards

one of these runs fine at 1920x1200, probably the most common resolution for the enthusiast gamer, so having 2 will give at least 3 years of max settings on anything new

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That wasn't the situation with the 48* range though, was it? The 4850 isn't even 18 months old and it is hardly going to play everything on max settings at 1920x1200 for the next 18 months.

To take this article, for example - at 1920x1200, 5770XF gives you 85 fps in Far Cry 2, as an average. That is at max settings, and I wouldn't surprise me at all if a game came out in 12 months that was more like 50 fps at max settings - then certain people would probably want more grunt to prevent it from reaching minimums of around 20 or so. It's all speculation, but I think the idea that a 5850/5770XF solution would leave you "sorted for three years of max settings" is fairly unlikely.

Well this article has put me in a right mess. I was all set on getting a 5850 as soon as possible but this has really put a spanner in the works.

I think I'd still rather the 5850, that way, I'm protected against driver problems with multi-GPU support. And when requirements move on a bit, (ie: when we start seeing some DX11 games maybe) I can add another 5850 in.

Does CrossfireX work with different GPUs by the way. Im thinking if there was a slight twek to the 5850 and it was renamed or remarketed in some way, (think GTS 250) would I still be able to add a newer card in?