Widescreen Gaming Forum

So I just got 3 1920*1080 screens and am running Eyefinity at 6080*1080 and my 5850 1GB is feeling the hurt so I was wondering is it worth getting a 6970 2GB($360) or a second 5850 1GB(~$200).

The rest of what I have (off the top of my head) is:

CPU: i7 860
MoBo: Gigabyte GA-P55A-UD3
RAM: 8 gig (it was cheap)

Check the benchmarks in any of my recent reviews. They have numbers for the HD 5850 in CFX as well as the HD 6970. Newer DX11 games need 2GB for 3x1920x1080 with 4xAA. AvP, F1 and STALKER won't even run with 1GB cards at full res and settings.

At 3x1600x900 the 5850 CFX seems to edge out the single card in most games, and often does in 3x1080p as well. Newer titles defer to the 2GB of the 6970.

http://www.widescreengamingforum.com/wiki/AMD_Radeon_6790_Featured_Review

Will all depend on what you play. The 6970 will be a bit more future proof, but I'd probably say get the cheaper card and go CFX. Just run 3x1600x900 when you need to, and save the money for the next round of upgrades.

Okay so my second 5850 came but if anything I've taken a performance hit in BC2 (my bread and butter gaming goto at the moment). I installed the latest drivers but I didn't do a driver scrub or anything first could that be a problem? I looked in the catalyst driver center and the clock speeds where different (765MHz and 725MHz) also the memory speeds (1135MHz and 1000MHz) so I over clocked the slower (and newer) of the two to match the old one but still no visible improvement if any.

Am I doing something wrong?

Ok from what I have figured it's that this Mobo is not good for Crossfire as one card is gimped to PCIe 4x thus being somewhat of a pain. This means I need to get a new mobo too fix it. Well it MIGHT fix it.

I have 2x 5850 and have the same problems in BC2 trying to run eyefinity + Crossfire at 5760 x 1080

The game runs good with eyefinity on a single card.

The game runs great with crossfire on a single monitor.

Try to put the two together, regardless of AA and other settings and it crawls performing worse than a single card.

Motherboard with 4x vs 16x second slot makes no difference in the performance with 5850 crossfire. They can't saturate the 4x slot so no reason to upgrade until you get a better graphics card. Other games run very well, batman arkham asylum, Arma2, dirt 2 and others run great. It's a frustrating problem I've been trying to find a solution for a while.

are you getting microstutter?