Need Advice: Crossfiring Two R9 280Xs with a PCI E 3.0 x16 and a PCI E 2.0 x16

Urtico

Honorable
Nov 7, 2013
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10,510
With the advent of the R9 280x and having it a bit suitable for my budget, I plan to get a pair of these sometime soon. Will I be able to crossfire the two with my mobo? I am using the MSI Z68A-G43 (G3).

I've read the box and Googled around and saw that it has one PCI Express 3.0 x16 slot and another PCI Express 2.0 x16 slot. Will it work if I crossfire the two cards by plugging them in each of the card slots? Or will it bottleneck and just prove better if I just buy a new mobo instead?

I also plan to upgrade to an Ivy and had the BIOS updated and the other driver necessary. I am majorly playing Guild Wars 2 and I intend to play it on 1440p .

Thank you in advance.
 
Solution
Okay.
1) You can crossfire without much bottlenecking. Perhaps 3% at most (it's a little complicated).

2) I would recommend a single-GPU setup like the EVGA 780 3GB with ACX cooler (967MHz base clock). It's $500 and a great card.

Crossfire (and even SLI) is not perfect. You are still going to get issues such as stutter and Crossfire still has problems with DX9 looking like 30FPS with stutter instead of 60FPS and smooth.

3) Upgrade to Ivy Bridge CPU:
*I wouldn't do this unless the gains are worth it. For example, the i5-3570K (unclockable) would be a huge upgrade over a dual-core Sandy, a small upgrade over a quad-core LOCKED Sandy, but not much of an upgrade over a quad-core Sandy which is already overclockable.
Okay.
1) You can crossfire without much bottlenecking. Perhaps 3% at most (it's a little complicated).

2) I would recommend a single-GPU setup like the EVGA 780 3GB with ACX cooler (967MHz base clock). It's $500 and a great card.

Crossfire (and even SLI) is not perfect. You are still going to get issues such as stutter and Crossfire still has problems with DX9 looking like 30FPS with stutter instead of 60FPS and smooth.

3) Upgrade to Ivy Bridge CPU:
*I wouldn't do this unless the gains are worth it. For example, the i5-3570K (unclockable) would be a huge upgrade over a dual-core Sandy, a small upgrade over a quad-core LOCKED Sandy, but not much of an upgrade over a quad-core Sandy which is already overclockable.
 
Solution