Is dual 5750's a good idea?

mcgge1360

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My motherboard supports crossfire but not SLI. I have an i3-8350K and 16 gb RAM, 3 1080p monitors.

For my budget PC I was going to buy a gtx 1050 2gb but today I got a free 5750 1gb DDR5. Instead of buying a 1050 should I go for another 5750 and crossfire them?
 
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You can run 3x monitors easily from the igpu. It only needs a gpu for graphics intensive workloads like gaming etc. You can even run 4k content from an igpu with no issues.

The only time a gpu will balk at running 3x monitors is if you try and run nvidia surround or AMD eyefinity under gaming loads, using all 3x monitors for gaming resolution. If just using the center monitor for gaming, the secondary monitors really don't affect the gpu much at all, even running stuff like YouTube videos.

Pat Flynn

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Honestly, the 1050 will likely give you better performance as not all games support SLI (or provide enough framerate boost to be worth it). Also, with only 1GB of ram, you'll have a hard time pushing current game titles up past mid detail levels.
 

mcgge1360

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but would the 2 cards not combine ram, giving 2GB, same as the 1050?
 

No, that's not the way crossfire works.

 

mcgge1360

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so it only combines the processing units?
 

True as far as it goes. The problem is not all games can/will take advantage of the dual GPUs, and even if they do, you won't get twice the performance of a single 5750. That is why Crossfile and SLI are not really recommended anymore: it is twice the cost, takes twice the power, causes twice the heat, twice as complicated to setup, for less than twice the performance( some games even perform worse with a crossfire/SLI setup than they do with a single card!).

 

InvalidError

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Kind of. But the scaling is far from 100% even in games that have explicit support for it and much worse (as bad as negatively impacting performance compared to a single card) in games that don't.

1GB of VRAM isn't enough to run most semi-recent games, even 2GB will be tight at mid-low settings in many cases.
 
Crossfire lets each gpu render half of the image, then it combines to present the image.
One problem is that two gpu's are never exactly the same so you will be prone to screen tearing and stuttering.
That is if the game itself can use CF.
Dual gpu is not good with entry level cards, and 5750 is about as entry level as you can get.
Perhaps the power of intel integrated HD530 graphics.

Your I3-8350K is an excellent processor.
You should probably be running a GTX1060/GTX1070 class card with it.
 

Karadjgne

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You can run 3x monitors easily from the igpu. It only needs a gpu for graphics intensive workloads like gaming etc. You can even run 4k content from an igpu with no issues.

The only time a gpu will balk at running 3x monitors is if you try and run nvidia surround or AMD eyefinity under gaming loads, using all 3x monitors for gaming resolution. If just using the center monitor for gaming, the secondary monitors really don't affect the gpu much at all, even running stuff like YouTube videos.
 
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