Excellent find. Tom's Hardware(for what is worth) rates a pair of these in crossfire equal to the 5850, GTX 280 and GTX285 for a lot less money. Doesn't have Eyefinity or DX11 like the 5850 but this set up is $200 less. Text
darkessenz21 said: Do I need to get xfire cables, or is mobo support sufficient?
The card comes with the xfire cable
netpsience
New Member
posted: Mar. 18, 2010 @ 4:27p
nsdp said: Excellent find. Tom's Hardware(for what is worth) rates a pair of these in crossfire equal to the 5850, GTX 280 and GTX285 for a lot less money. Doesn't have Eyefinity or DX11 like the 5850 but this set up is $200 less. Text
@ndsp: One catch with the Tom's Hardware article you referenced. In that leaderboard, they're referring to single card discrete graphics adapters. Where they say "HD 4850 X2" they mean the Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB card. i.e. 2 GPUs on a single board.
That said, at the moment I have two 512MB HD4850's in Crossfire. When playing L4D with one board, I would notice stuttering video in some high intensity sections, even when playing a single-player local game. With 2 x HD4850's, no such problems.
HL2:LC Video stress test went from 140FPS AVG. to 200 FPS AVG. when I went from single 4850 to dual crossfire. This is with most of the graphics settings at what HL2LC recommends. I bumped it to 2x MSAA and 2X aniso and didn't take much of a performance hit.
In CS:S Video Stress Test this setup gets 270FPS.
FWIW, I'm running a AMD PII 955 w/ 8GB RAM, so that helps a bit too.
In case someone in the Northern VA area wants one of these, I have two I'm looking to offload. I'd them one go for $65 a pop or $120 for both.
netpsience said: nsdp said: Excellent find. Tom's Hardware(for what is worth) rates a pair of these in crossfire equal to the 5850, GTX 280 and GTX285 for a lot less money. Doesn't have Eyefinity or DX11 like the 5850 but this set up is $200 less. Text
@ndsp: One catch with the Tom's Hardware article you referenced. In that leaderboard, they're referring to single card discrete graphics adapters. Where they say "HD 4850 X2" they mean the Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB card. i.e. 2 GPUs on a single board.
That said, at the moment I have two 512MB HD4850's in Crossfire. When playing L4D with one board, I would notice stuttering video in some high intensity sections, even when playing a single-player local game. With 2 x HD4850's, no such problems.
HL2:LC Video stress test went from 140FPS AVG. to 200 FPS AVG. when I went from single 4850 to dual crossfire. This is with most of the graphics settings at what HL2LC recommends. I bumped it to 2x MSAA and 2X aniso and didn't take much of a performance hit.
In CS:S Video Stress Test this setup gets 270FPS.
FWIW, I'm running a AMD PII 955 w/ 8GB RAM, so that helps a bit too.
In case someone in the Northern VA area wants one of these, I have two I'm looking to offload. I'd them one go for $65 a pop or $120 for both.
If you actually read what he posted, he specifically said those in crossfire are equal to a single HD5850, which is true based on the testing that has been done. Microstuttering really isn't a big issue, especially since drivers have gotten much better from when they started out, resolving most crossfire/SLI issues. Two of these cost less than $200, while getting the same power in a single card would require going after the HD5850 or GTX 285, both of which cost at least $100 more than two of these.
I don't think that there is any question that the microstuttering is due to code issues. Running CHAPEL and OpenCL for seismic work there are no issues even with the 4850x2 in Crossfire running the Schlumberger Petrel software. Chapel is a bare bones version of SUSE that omits useless things like CD burning, Audio, Video streaming etc. It is also fully IEEE754 compliant in 64 bit. Windows has some glitches although W7 is the first version since W2k I am willing to use. Just wish they would let you strip out useless overhead. You are more likely to have problems with Intel since EM64T is NOT 100% IEEE754 compliant in 64 bit; it is for 32 bit but that has limitations which will bite big time when HD sectors change from 512k to 4096k in the immediate future.
eliteramen said: Also, don't buy two for Crossfire. You might experience microstuttering. Some people don't see it ... some people deny it ... but hey why risk it? (-:
I have the 4850X2 and notice microstuttering when my framerate drops. It is a problem that will exist in all multi-gpu situations (both Xfire and SLI) because all of the current technology is based on alternate frame rendering, where each gpu renders every other frame. As such, you may get two frames very quickly and then have a larger gap before the next frame is done rendering. So while you may be getting an average of 30 frames per second they are coming irregularly. Some people will notice it and for others they will swear it doesn't exist. The lower the framerate, the more likely you will notice it...I don't see it at all at 60fps.
This is not a complete deal breaker though as long you can get crossfire cheap enough, such at with this 4850. In games that don't make good use of crossfire just turn it off, take the fps hit and it will look smoother. In games that make good use of crossfire turn it on and make sure your settings keep the fps high. In the end a single card will always be better, but you can typically get a multi-card solution much cheaper.
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