GTX 680 and ATI 5870

[Mr Ski 73]

Hi

I have recently installed a GTX 680 and I am happy with the results. I use Lightroom, Photoshop and DXO extensively and found this is quite a speed improvement over my old ATI 5870

Before I sell my 5870 in eBay is there any benefit in putting this card in my 5.1 as well and 'crossfiring'

Any thoughts appreciated, I understand I can use a splitter for power but don't know if this will cause more harm than good. I am only using a single monitor

 

[orph]

if the 5870 is a mac card might be nice as a back up, is the 680 flashed ? if not the 5870 might be useful if you have problems but mostly not that useful.

crossfiring is only on for windos games & requires 2 ATI cards or for the nvidia's version of crossfiring aka sli requires 2 nvidia cards. also it wont work 100% with all games so im not shore if it's relay worth the pain

+ dont they both require 2 power cables so unless you get a second power unit to externally power the cards (or do the mod to the power unit which is not for beginners) you will have problems

windows tends to have problems with an ati card and a nvida card installed at the same time & if you game will only use one of the two.

im not shore if dual un matched mixed brand cards can be used for openCL work, people do tend to use pairs of the same model.

the 680 is a good card ^^ have fun

 

[h9826790]

I guess your "crossfiring" simply means use both card at the same time.

Technically, use splitter may make the GPUs draw much more than the officially limit (75W) from each mini 6pin power source.

In real, that should not be a problem unless you run some programme that can stress both card at the same time (e.g. OpenCL) which seems not included in your work flow.

Video editing may able to use both card as well (OpenCL), but unless 4K editing, usually won't stress the card that much to draw full power.

IMO, if you have no plan to do anything with OpenCL, sell it or keep it as a backup card is better.

 

[r6mile]

I would say just sell the 5870 to recoup the cost of the 680.

 

[Mr Ski 73]

Thanks to all. Sell it is. My 680 is a Mac card and will run a 4K display so fairly future proof in my 5.1