You have circled the globe more than a few times.




I am glad that you did not have a meltdown. Is it getting close to engine overhaul time for you?

The overhaul on my one engine is almost complete. I had a XFX HD5850 Black Edition video card flame out and I could not get a restart. Came into home base and did a full stop and realized I had a catastrophic engine failure. I replaced the 1 engine with a less powerfull NVIDIA GTX460 to get back into the fray. That left the 2 remaining HD5850's pushing with some assistance from the 460.

The engine was shipped to XFX for major overhaul but they decided that there was too much pitting on the blades and the engine was retired from service. They then honored their warranty and sent me a XFX HD5870 as a replacement engine.



That will increase my speed slightly.

Hypernova I hope that you find a good balance of speed and temperature for your engines.

OK, here is what I know:
If I crossfire a HD5850 and a HD5870 the 5870 will downclock itself to the 5850's GPU and Memory clock settings.

Now here is the question:
If I put 2-5850's in slot 1 and 2 and crossfire them and then place a 5870 in slot 3 without a installing a crossfire bridge will the 5870 still downclock?

I want the 5870 at full speed and the 5850's have enough horsepower for my gaming when crossfired. So the output from the 5870 is not needed for driving a display.

Question comes up because XFX just did a warranty swap on a HD5850 Black Edition on me and sent a HD5870 as the replacement. I was running 3-5850's crossfired but I sure would love the boost the 5870 should be able to provide.

Thanks Hypernova. I also posted the question over at Milkyway and Zydor posted a reply also. He seems to have a whole lot of information on how the ATI cards work.
He told me that if I attach the crossfire X bridge to the 2 5850 cards only and leave the 5870 card by itself in slot 3 that the 5870 will run at full speed. He also told me that I would be able to Overclock the 5870 if I wanted to.
I am putting out enough heat with this 1 unit to heat a good sized room when all 8 threads and 3 video cards are running at 100%. So far I have been able to keep up with the cooling so to keep from having heat issues I will probably just stick with overclocking the CPU only.

Thanks Hypernova.

I am running a Vantage sealed water cooling system for the CPU right now that is allowing me to run 4.6GHz on all 8 threads stable. I did put some thought into water cooling the GPU's but I have to admit I was intimidated by the set-up. I would have to buy water blocks, tubing, elbows, pump, radiator and water treatment.

If I do another build I plan on LGA2011 with 4 PCIe slots so I will most likely have to water cool the CPU and GPU's to keep the heat down.

I have already found that my current system has CPU and chipset heat issues caused by the GPU's when I overclock the CPU higher than I am now or when I overclock too high on the GPU's. I may be able to aleviate some of the heat by changing the side fan on the case to pull out the heat from the case. I will give that a try before summer gets in full swing. 10 fans in the case and heat still seems to be plentiful.

By all means Hypernova. The call was placed and you cannot ignore a mayday.

You have created a huge distance between our teams that will stand for a time to come.

Thank You and have fun.