Go 4850 crossfire or stay with GTX 260

[NitroStar]

I have a nVidia GTX 260 (216) model in my racing sim rig. Wondering if I would get enough performance gain by getting another ATI 4850 card (I have one already in another sim rig), and replacing my GTX 260 card with this Crossfire setup.

I have:
1. Gigabyte GA-MA780G-UD3H motherboard. If I put two 4850 cards on it, one card will be 16x and other one will be 4x.
2. AMD 965 Black ed. processor overclocked to 3.8
3. Corsair TX650W power supply

I can't find the exact same XFX ATI HD4850 512MB model as the one I've got, so I would get the newer XFX HD4850 1GB card (should these cards crossfire easily?).

This sim rig is ONLY used for iRacing, rFactor, Need for Speed Shift, Dirt 2, GTR Evolution and Race On, GTR2, and the new F1 2010 coming in a couple months.

My current 3DMark06 score with the GTX260 card is: just over 19,000.

Thanks a bunch.

 

[wa1]

You can CF 2 HD4850 even with different memory size, don't worry about that.

x16/x16, x16/x8 and x8/x8 setup are good, but not with x16/x4, you'll lost much speed...

Why don't you sell your HD4850 or GTX260 or even both and get a single powerful card like HD5850/HD5870?

 

[spentshells]

You can CF 2 HD4850 even with different memory size, don't worry about that.

x16/x16, x16/x8 and x8/x8 setup are good, but not with x16/x4, you'll lost much speed...

Why don't you sell your HD4850 or GTX260 or even both and get a single powerful card like HD5850/HD5870?

Yeah this is the best idea


I don't know for sure but it seems going to a 460 would help, but the upgrade wouldn't really be as noticeable

 

[Maziar]

I agree with wa1.
I wouldn't recommend using CF on your motherboard because 16x4x performs significantly slower than dual 8x/16x, so either consider another motherboard for CF, or get a single more powerful card like GTX 460 or HD 5850(if your budget allows)

 

[NitroStar]

Good quick information. I think I should do the motherboard thing to "get ready 😗 " for a better graphics update. I think my 965 processor is deserving of a better motherboard. I'll start reading up on some great motherboard choices for my AMD 965 Black ed. processor. There are FAR more choices for motherboards than graphics cards . I thought I was getting a good one last year, but the northbridge gets so hot, I had to put a fan on it. Heatsink was loose too.

Thanks a lot.

 

[taso11]

You could even do sli with this hack:

http://xdevs.com/e107_plugins/content/content.php?content.30

as someone has verified that it works on your motherboard. I don't know how much the 4x slot will hurt performance though. Do you have another 260 to try? My Penom 955 could not keep up with 3 gtx 260's in 3-way sli, but I think that was because of motherboard pcie lane architecture.

 

[Maziar]

the 4x slot definitely hurts, especially in CF mode,
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/crossfire-pci-express,2095.html