I’ve been looking to beef up the performance of my gaming machine. Patiently I waited for the new offerings from AMD & nVidia. AMD finally coughed up the 7970 which will MSRP for $550. Ouch! nVidia’s offering is too far away right now.
Given that a single 7970 wasn’t going to cut it for my 20|30|20 PLP monitor setup. I decided to try out 2 R6970’s in crossfire. I only used SLi once before quite awhile back….I wasn’t impressed with the economic : performance ratio. Lately I’ve seen much better scaling of performance with multiple GPU setups and was willing to give it another go. And wow what difference.
Primarily testing with Battlefield 3 the current GPU KO champ. Performance improved at least 60% in BF3 alone. Frame rates went from a barely playable 35-40 avg to well over 80fps. turning up the eyecandy brought it back down to around 58fps, but its gorgeous and still very playable, for this mediocre gamer. Heat output isn’t too bad as these were fairly cool and quiet cards especially when you consider the level of performance you get. My system is coping quite well. Full system idle wattage isn’t crazy 200w @ the wall, up from 145w with the single card. Full bore gaming skyrocketed up to 545w, up from 350w. Neither are overclocked. While I did tinker with the settings and was able to achieve over 1GHz on both, my now smallish 750w PSU is going to prevent any overclocking for now. Honestly with the numbers I’m getting, stock is just fine.
Happy Gaming in 2012!
The 13” long beasts
Prepping the system for the second card…
ohhh the trigger finger was getting’ antsy
All done ready to let it loose!
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