snowman1978
asked on
To upgrade my Crossfire graphics cards or my CPU?
With my current set up, which is going to make the biggest difference, moving to X1900XT Crossfire or upgrading my CPU and if it is upgrading to 1900XT, what effect will it have if I just had the Crossfire edition with the X1800XT card?
I'm not sure now where the bottleneck is!!
Paul.
I'm not sure now where the bottleneck is!!
Paul.
mandude0
What processor are you running? We need more hardware info to give a good assesment.
ASKER
AMD Athlon64 single core 3500+
Sapphire PURE Crossfire 939 Motherboard
2Gb Corsair 3200
3D ATI Radeon X1800XT 512Mb
X1800 Radeon 'Master crossfire edition' ATI
Creative X-Fi PCi
NEC ND4551 Black DVDRW
1 x Raptor 32Gb HD SATA
1 x 200Gb HD SATA
Sapphire PURE Crossfire 939 Motherboard
2Gb Corsair 3200
3D ATI Radeon X1800XT 512Mb
X1800 Radeon 'Master crossfire edition' ATI
Creative X-Fi PCi
NEC ND4551 Black DVDRW
1 x Raptor 32Gb HD SATA
1 x 200Gb HD SATA
Some cards perform better on certain games than others. I doubt that you can improve much on your cpu, unless you are willing to spend a lot of money or overclock. By default, that leaves the video card as the point of improvement, unless you know that your cpu is at 100% when playing games.
ASKER
What I'm wondering is if the performance of the graphics cards are being held back by the CPU
You may be looking at a driver issue, which ATI is notorius for with newer cards. It sometimes takes ATI a few driver revisions before they release solid drivers.
Not recommended by manufacturer but there are alternate drivers that some people swear by. I would keep official ATI drivers on hand to reinstall if the alternate drivers do not work well. I have never tried any of these myself so I can't say for sure that they are even worth a shot but if you are desperate for a last straw fix.
http://www.omegadrivers.net/main.php
If I didn't hear so many people with high opinions of this site I wouldn't even have suggested it.
Good luck.
Not recommended by manufacturer but there are alternate drivers that some people swear by. I would keep official ATI drivers on hand to reinstall if the alternate drivers do not work well. I have never tried any of these myself so I can't say for sure that they are even worth a shot but if you are desperate for a last straw fix.
http://www.omegadrivers.net/main.php
If I didn't hear so many people with high opinions of this site I wouldn't even have suggested it.
Good luck.
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ASKER
So basically we are saying upgrade to x1900XT?
If so, can I mix an X1900XT Crossfire edition with a X1800XT?
If so, can I mix an X1900XT Crossfire edition with a X1800XT?
As far as I know, when running SLI, both cards have to be the same. I could be worn on that.
Crossfire works a little different than SLI - you can have two different Radeons, but the pair will operate as if you had two of the slower of the two cards installed. In other words, it drops down to the slowest denominator.