DC II 6970 crossfire

[Christ]

i plan to crossfire with dual DC II 6970 on the CH V formula board, is it possible to do this with the board layout? will a 850w power supply enough to do this?

here is my gaming rig full spec:

Processor: Phenom II X6 1100T BE
RAM: Kingston HyperX DDR3 1333Mhz 8GB
After market CPU cooler: Noctua NH D14 (dual fan installed)
GPU: Asus 6970 DC II
Motherboard: Asus Crosshair V Formula AM3+
PSU: Silverstone Strider Gold 850w Modular
HDD: WD Black SATA III
SSD: Mushkin Callisto SATA II 60 GB
Chassis: Silverstone RV03
DVD ROM: Pioneer

Any suggestion would be appreciated, thanks in advance.

[xeromist]

I'm not sure about the spacing but the PSU should work. A lot of the TDP ratings released by the manufacturers sound pretty dire in terms of consumption but as a gaming rig basically nobody ever sees that. Most rigs draw much less than 850, especially if you aren't overclocking.

[Christ]

but the vid card is factory overclocked to 890Mhz of engine clock, i'm afraid with one more card my power supply won't do the job........

[xeromist]

I'm not sure what the stores in your neighborhood carry but at my home improvement store they have kill-a-watt power meters which will tell you how much anything is drawing. You can use it for appliances, computers, basically anything you can plug into a wall socket. They are generally around $20 USD so not too expensive. Using one of these, myself and many people that I know have discovered that high performance SLI/CF computers are pulling around 500W. Now, that doesn't mean go get a 500W PSU. There are issues of spikes in draw and rail division in the PSU but the point is that most PC's are not drawing what their owners think.

[Christ]

since power isn't the issue then i really should go for another DC II 6970, but recently AMD had announced that their latest radeon 7xxx series will hit the market, i really did want to wait for them, but after that i afraid i will end up wating for 8xxx series and so on, and end up with nothing just wait......wait.....wait....... so my main concern is that if i xfired the DC II 6970, how long will my gaming rig last, and can i still play all the games in the future, with ultra setting and high frame rates?

[xeromist]

I doubt anyone can predict exactly how long hardware will last since we don't know what we'll be playing but I'd say that CF setup should last you a while. The other thing to consider is that you don't know what kind of performance you'll get from an unreleased card. The 7 series could come out and barely improve the 6 series then you would have waited for nothing.

Unless you have reason to believe that a new generation is going to blow everything out of the water within a month I would recommend upgrading when you can no longer play the games you love at the settings you want. Waiting months for a hardware release doesn't make much sense if your current setup isn't working to your expectations now.

[Christ]

you have a point indeed, having a crossfire setup really last a while, i also saw many forum people who uses AMD 4870 graphic with crossfire still running strong, just they're not DirectX 11 capable, but for games which is DirectX 10 / 10.1 it still gain some performance over the single GPU high-end 5xxx and 6xxx series like 58xx or 68xx, in addition the DirectX 11 games aren't really popularized yet compared to DirectX 10 /10.1 i really hope the crossfire is going to worth a while, but i also heard that many people have trouble with the crossfire setup, like BSOD, crossfire mode is not detected and games isn't running at the expected frame rate just like single GPU perfoemance, all this stuff like this............