Best Crossfire Combo for under $150

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Okay, I am looking to upgrade my video card from ancient to merely out of date. I like to be able to keep dozens of windows open on the net and I play some graphics intensive games, but nothing cutting edge. Mostly I am a traditional war gamer (not FPS stuff, those aren't traditional war games) as in turn based stuff so very few games I have or am interested in will press a GPU. Mainly what I want is a nice graphics system capable of handling multiple monitors, with lots of accumulated visual crap so I don't have to close stuff a lot, and without slowing the system down.

Now in a couple years my kids will be getting old enough to play more graphics intensive stuff, so maybe if I could get something that will still run those games adequately in a few years.

Any ideas? The first card I found was the Radeon x1950. I think it is Crossfire and cheap used but I have no idea if that card is best for me.
 
Well how many monitors are you going to be running? If you have an Intel system, you can use 2 monitors off the integrated GPU and 2 monitors off the GPU. My suggestion would be the GTX 750 Ti, which is quiet, and uses very little power. Can still also play pretty intensive games at medium/high, and normal games at High/Ultra.

If you need more than 4 monitors, dual GPUs will be the way to go, but not in Crossfire/SLI, as the system would see that as a single output device.
 
The Radeon X1950 is an extremely old card. I'm not sure it's even supported any longer. Also, unfortunately, the graphics card is one of the most power hungry components in your computer. If your system doesn't have a sufficient power supply, you'll need to replace that as well.

So we'll need a full system specification or if you purchased the system off the shelf, a manufacturer and model number.

-Wolf sends
 
I never got back to this thread (long story). I appreciate the replies and I actually still need the information as I am just now getting to rebuild my system.

I'm trying to do a cost effective upgrade to my main system. The specs are or will be:
Asus P5WDG2 WS Pro
QX6850 CPU
Upgraded to 6 or 8 GB
I already have dual PSUs to help handle the HD load. One if a 550w Corsair and the other is about the same rating, but I can't recall the brand right now. Silver stone maybe?
I have about 6 15k SCSI drives in a RAID config working thru the PCI-X card and another 6 HDs. I'm going to change this config around and probably move the SCSI drive off into a server area for the house.

one other thing: I will likely be upgrading one of the PSUs to a 1Kw unit so I can run the enough system without any burden on the PSU and allowing for the more expansion.

After all this I STILL have my old X1950 graphics card. Not exactly state of the art, but I don't play first person shooters or anything. OTOH, I am thinking of raising my budget to maybe 200 or 250 for a card or pair of cards.

Finally, I need to run two monitors. I can't envision doing more than that. Perhaps one day I will go hog wild, but if I cross that bridge one day and can afford more monitors then maybe I'll be able to afford a better GPU too!

Thanks for any replies and plz let me know if I am missing any pertinent info.
Aaron
 
You reminds me of my X1650 inside my desk (which is still working when the last time I release it from it's duty). :)

Anyway, X1950 is WAY too ancient, you can't get anywhere with that card anymore. Any other though, adding more RAM will not help that much.
 
To be honest I don't exactly NEED crossfire, but I figured after nearly twenty years of building my own systems that I wanted to play with this seeing that this is one of the things I have never experimented with and have no practical experience with it. So I figured maybe it'd be fun to implement and might give a performance boost. But now that you ask, this isn't a terribly good reason.... When money wasn't as tight as it is now I used to like to buy things and experiment, but with two kids (both of whom have special needs) I try to be frugal.

I think the only genuinely good reasons I can give for crossfire is to make running two monitors more efficient (although I may be wrong here as I'm pretty ignorant on the state of contemporary video cards, as you've no doubt guessed) and handling a heavy window workload in Windows. It it difficult to explain, but when I write and I have a stream of thought, I don't like to get too distracted and like to have info at my fingertips. Maintaining a stream of thought is important if I'm on a roll and anything I can do to keep info at the ready I do. That's another long story, but it is to cope with some memory issues related to Lyme disease. However, I will end up with dozens and dozens of windows open and the machine will often get bogged down. OTOH, I don't know how much this is a CPU or GPU issue (or a memory issue). Can anyway advise?

One thing of note: I'm actually upgrading the CPU to the QX6850 from a Q6400. The Q6400 was never a very fast CPU, despite being a quad core, and I think the QX6850 will be a nice upgrade. And the difference between updating just a bit of RAM and the new CPU versus replacing them with new, cutting edge stuff is easily $500, so I am definitely going the cheap route. The RAM/CPU are only about $100 total, whereas a new MOBO that is the same quality that the P5WDG2 was in its day would be $300+ alone... Ugh! So I think I'm managing to balance price with performance.
 
First off, unless I missed something, your motherboard does not support Crossfire. Secondly, since you're not talking about gaming and just office applications, your current graphics card is more than sufficient for a dual monitor set up. Your current system with 8GB of RAM should be more than sufficient to handle most any task outside of heavy gaming/rendering.

-Wolf sends
 
I'm glad you mentioned that. In the year and a half since I originally posted this thread I've changed up my plan quite a bit and I totally forgot to check this MB. Frankly, I had forgotten what the original plan was until you mentioned that the P5WDG2 doesn't have crossfire. So I went back and looked at some of my other MBs and I have an unused one that does support crossfire. I think this was one of the options I was considering 18 months ago--to move the P5WDG2 into being a server and use a different MB that could have better graphics capabilities. Now that I decided to stick with my old MB I forgot to go back and check..... man my mind isn't what it used to be. Thanks for catching my mistake.

Do you think I'll gain any benefit from a single card upgrade? I'm not a graphics heavy gamer, but since I'm doing this upgrade I want it to last a good while without more tinkering. When I do play games it is stuff like the Europa Universalis series or Supreme Commander (which is very burdensome on even good CPUs). I probably should've mentioned going earlier, but seeing as lately--like for nearly two years--I haven't gotten to play any games on my PC I didn't think about it. Once my kids get a bit older, though, I'm sure I'll get more time and get back to conquering the world.

EDIT: I decided to go ahead and take a look at the P5WDG2 manual and it does support crossfire. It is t prominently listed anywhere on the MB site page though, which is kind of weird. However, when you flip thru the manual the instructions talk about setting up a dual video card, crossfire setup.

At this point I have no recollection what my original plan was. However, since I could do it, is there any point to a two video card setup? It sounds like it would mostly be wasted on me.