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Wanting to crossfire or whatever an APU

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ezzep123

Registered
Joined
Mar 19, 2012
I have a GIGABYTE GA-A75M-UD2H motherboard, with a 3870k apu. I was wanting to put an HD6670 or whatever...6770? card in my rig. Here's the thing--my board is PCI-E 2.0, and the cards are all 2.1. So, can I do this, or will it not work? And suggestions if I can't? No, I really really don't like Nvidia anymore. I mean, I have nothing against them, but I've become a fan of AMD/ATI now for a couple of years...mainly that I can underclock my cpu when downloading stuff overnight to save power.
Right now I'm using the APU for video playing Skyrim, and I need something with a bit more zing to it. I mean, it's not bad. Tom's hardware says it's not playable, but Tom is full of crap...if it wasn't playable, I would have said "Damn, I got burned!"
I have a 500W Antec PSU if that helps. Any more info needed please ask. Thanks for your time and help.:sn:
 
Yes it will work, PCI-E x16 standard is backwards compatible the same way USB and SATA are. The highest card rated for dual graphics is a 6670. I can tell you that after 11.12 drivers the dual graphics mode worked MUCH MUCH better than it did at release time(when most of the reviews were written).
So what your looking for is a 1GB GDDR5 6670 if you want to get the most performance possible with dual graphics. The 1GB GDDR3 cards are also very good and the difference is very small between them, so if you need to save a bit of money do this instead.
 
Would I see any difference between the 1G and 2G version? I've been reading that it is irrelevant in how much video ram you have these days, but I have no idea.
Yeah, I bet if I would've read the details or used google or whatever I would've found the answer. But I was too lazy to look, so thanks for the reply.
 
Would I see any difference between the 1G and 2G version? I've been reading that it is irrelevant in how much video ram you have these days, but I have no idea.
Yeah, I bet if I would've read the details or used google or whatever I would've found the answer. But I was too lazy to look, so thanks for the reply.

It's relevant at high res (above 1080p)/high AA.
But one gig is enough in most cases.
 
Heres the thing with more vRam, you dont have enough GPU to use it. Very high resolutions or games modded with extra high resolution textures will push your vRam usage very high very quickly. Setting the AA very high also has an impact on this because textures stay in the frame buffer longer. The AMD Dual Graphics solution just doesnt really have the power to push those settings so I wouldnt worry about it.

Dual Graphics also works best when you have the same amount of ram assigned to the IGP as you do the primary GPU. I doubt you want to hand over half of your system ram just incase you go over 1GB. TBH I play skyrim at 1920x1200 with the HD texture pack, ultra detail settings, modified ini for even higher settings, modified graphics driver settings for even more detail, and like 3GB worth of community created ultra high resolution textures with 1GB of vRam and its pretty rare to get an FPS drop due to an overloaded framebuffer. It does use about 800mb of vRam as a minimum on these settings though. Im also running about 4x the GPU power in my rig as that dual graphics has. I'm not knocking the Dual Graphics at all here my wifes rig runs the 3870k+6670 combo and it looks/plays fantastic on everything shes playing @ 1080p, some games are even maxed out on detail settings.

Spore - MAX
Assasins creed 1 & 2 - Max + driver & ini tweaks
StarCraft 2 - HIGH/ULTRA mix(Ultra or extreme is just a bit to much for it)
League Of Legends - MAX

I havent had a chance to test many other games on her rig in depth but considering its price the performance is very good. Im sure you will love the improvement going to Dual Graphics brings.
 
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