3X,4XCF 4870 vs 280GX SLI

Chiropteran

Diamond Member
Nov 14, 2003
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Considering the crazy price disparity, it seems silly to compare 2X CF 4870 vs a 2X SLI 280GX. Are there any reviews out there that compare 3X or 4X crossfire with 4870's to a 280GX SLI setup? Or is there some reason more than 2X CF isn't possible with the 4870?
 

lopri

Elite Member
Jul 27, 2002
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I doubt that anyone will recommend a 3 or 4 card CF setup. It's possible, but it's silly.
 

bryanW1995

Lifer
May 22, 2007
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yes, until daamit gets crossfire x to scale better you won't see much benefit to 3 or more gpus.
 

KeithTalent

Elite Member | Administrator | No Lifer
Administrator
Nov 30, 2005
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Considering how poorly Crossfire scales with 2 cards in many instances, once you add a third or even a fourth card, the scaling would be absolutely horrendous. I imagine this is part of the reason why you do not see many reviews for these setups, they are just not viable.

KT
 

bunnyfubbles

Lifer
Sep 3, 2001
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Enough talk of scaling, even if the parts could scale 100% we'd be well into the realm of CPU bottlenecking.

It really goes from practicality to pure fantasy. Right now its more of a question to go with 2 x 4870 CF and SAVE $700 to be either put away for future use or to be used in upgrading / adding alternative parts to improve performance elsewhere. Heck, $700 would go a long way in upgrading the CPU to a QX9650 so you could have a 4GHz quadcore to try and make sure that your CPU isn't going to be a bottleneck...$700 would also all you to grab two VelociRaptors for some RAID-0 goodness and thus improve loading / boot times...you get the idea...
 

AmberClad

Diamond Member
Jul 23, 2005
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You actually get a drop in performance once you start adding in a third or a fourth CrossFire card.

Tweaktown has a review of CrossFireX'ed 4850 if you want the full details. Also, a guy from one of the system builders did some benchmarks with Franken-FireX'ed 2x4850 + 2x4870 and posted the results here at AT.
 

Chiropteran

Diamond Member
Nov 14, 2003
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Originally posted by: AmberClad
You actually get a drop in performance once you start adding in a third or a fourth CrossFire card.

Tweaktown has a review of CrossFireX'ed 4850 if you want the full details. Also, a guy from one of the system builders did some benchmarks with Franken-FireX'ed 2x4850 + 2x4870 and posted the results here at AT.

Hah, those benchmark results are pretty funny. Hopefully most of that will be fixed in later driver revisions.
 

schneiderguy

Lifer
Jun 26, 2006
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The TweakTown review is completely worthless because they're using a 16x/16x/4x/4x board which like they found, will reduce performance below the 2 card level. :confused:
 

Piuc2020

Golden Member
Nov 4, 2005
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Originally posted by: themisfit610
Tri-SLI with GTX 280s is stupid fast...

The financial cost is way too high, motherboard plus an insane PSU plus the actual cards, not to mention it will probably break your house circuitry :p

Efficient architectures for the win!
 

Sylvanas

Diamond Member
Jan 20, 2004
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4870 CF is more than enough- in some cases it is even faster than GTX280 SLI (have a look at AT's review) while costing half the price, there is little point to GTX280 SLI. If you are thinking of shelling out however, I would perhaps wait it out for the 4870X2...it looks like it will improve scaling and inter-GPU communications by it's new internal CF hardware.
 

Chiropteran

Diamond Member
Nov 14, 2003
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Yeah, I'm not looking to buy yet. My current machine isn't CF capable, and I can't upgrade the motherboard without getting a new case and at that point I'd prefer to just build a second computer. So I'm waiting a bit. I may buy a single 4870 if there is an amazing deal in the next few months, otherwise I'll be waiting until I build my next system.