Crossfire or SLI...

[EdzAviator]

I am planning to buy a video card and hopefully to enable C/F or SLI...

The Mobo I will buy will depend on the Video I will also buy..

Considering that ATI said that its new Crossfire technology will let you enable crossfire even if you don't have identical video card...

If I go to SLI, it will be on nforce chipset and if C/F it will be intel x38 for my C2D and AMD 790FX for my X2 to be upgrade to Phenom nx yr...

Will there be any performance differnce between SLI in nvidia and the Spider platform Crossfire in ATI...???

At the moment, i'm planning to only have 2 video cards...but in going the Spider platform route, there's the temptation of having the ability to add 2 more cards in the future to make it 4 all in all...

So, any help, suggestions, advice etc...

 

[MarcVenice]

Hmz, neither scale really well, although I'm inclined to think that Crossfire is going to receive more support. Why ? Well, because it seems that ATI is really moving into a direction where they don't have 1 GPU that owns the performance crown, they instead are planning to have several cores on 1 card, or several cards linked together, to take the performance crown. But that's PURE speculation, C/F or SLI have never worked all that well.

Besides that though, for SLI you have to go with a old chipset, or wait for nvidia's new chipset, the 780i, iirc. The latter might be a good option, but WILL be expensive. For Crossfire you can still go with a p35 mobo, or you could buy a x38 mobo, but that one is also pretty expensive right now, while not giving any extra performance over p35. But, going for 4 videocards is kind of ridiculous, by the time you can do that, you would be better of selling the HD3870's you probably plan on buying, and buy 2, or perhaps even one videocard, that outperforms your old crossfired HD3870's. Power consumption with 4 videocards will also be ridiculous.

 

[darkxknight]

until 780i comes out, SLI won't be at its "full" potential

 

[Nurn]

My opinion - best bet is crossfire on a X38.

 

[BoboKatt]

Although I cannot comment on newer X3800 based ATI cards, I currently do have a crossfire set up on a P35 (asus p5k-E Wifi). The X1950XTX crossfire setup is still amazing in my books. The performace I get on the games I play is great.

Also I love the fact that Avivo is supported for watching my DVD and other movie content outputed to my 42 LCD 1080p TV. All in all, personally I still give the crown to crossfire if I had to go with 2 cards. On the other hand LOL, my other system just has 1 8800GTX and, it's quieter, cooler, gives me space to work in my case and add in cards, and overall has less problems and heck performs just as well if not faster.

 

[zagood]

I like nV cards better, but crossfire has better drivers and more mobo options. If you really need to go multi-gpu, crossfire is the way to go, but if you're slowbuilding it would probably be worth it to wait for the new generation of nV cards and get a single card setup.

-z

 

[Syntax Error]

Originally posted by: darkxknight
until 780i comes out, SLI won't be at its "full" potential

What's to say 780i's going to make SLI scale to its "full" potential?