Can these crossfire?

[wss_003]

so i have a very low end build that is my office pc and I received a gift card via the rewards card for best buy so i ordered an xfx r5 220 core edition graphics card and was thinking that i should be able to crossfire that with the installed a6-7400k apu. Mind you i have no expectations to play video games on this cp I do use three monitors though and though this may help take some strain off the apu...anyone out there done this? will it make any difference at all or did i was the money (even though it was free)

 

[dwatterworth]

You can run the R5 220 in dual graphics mode with the APU, however, I doubt that any non-game oriented programs will take much advantage of crossfire. I would avoid the complexity and probably instability of running these in dual graphics mode, along with all the accompanying headaches from drivers and profiles and instead just hook either all of the displays to the 220 or split the outputs of the APU/motherboard and GPU to provide the correct connections that your screens need.

What programs are you using? Regular office productivity oriented stuff? The APU probably isn't even strained much across 3 displays, especially if they are 1920x1080 or lower resolution.

 

[wss_003]

Im sure your right about there not being any strain on the apu but it was free. i am very familiar with crossfire and sli when useing two cards as i have had both and i think i will just do what you said and split the screens up, just out of curiosity is this card capable of running any games obviously on the lowest setting but if not what would be the target market with a card like this

 

[dwatterworth]

You can't really beat free!

The target market is probably very similar to what you are using it for. Plenty of productivity and media applications can use the GPU to accelerate a workload. There is also a lot of support for certain types of shaders that aren't necessarily supported on integrated graphics of certain processors.

There are also applications that aren't extremely demanding necessarily but still require a dedicated GPU. The programs that can make direct use of the GPU often aren't structured in a way to use the resources that integrated gpus are based on, especially shared memory.

I think that card could run some games, especially older programs. At that point I think the resolution is a big limiter on performance. 2D or non-ray traced 3d games should be able to run on that card without issue. I had a radeon 3650 GPU 5 years ago that I played tons of games on with low to medium settings. That card had slightly more stream processors (of an older generation) but made use of ddr2 memory. I would expect the performance to actually be comparable.

Modern games are mostly (unfortunately) not coded very well. You can see in GPU benchmarks that the better coded/optimized games will run on basically anything while the real pigs that are often poorly converted console titles require ridiculous hardware to even offer playable frame rates on the lowest settings. --see the latest Ubisoft Assassins creed game. Unity barely runs on the latest top tier hardware. Compare Unity to something like battlefield 4 which WILL run with very playable performance on integrated graphics alone.