I haven't found a good answer to this with searching. Is crossfire demanding on the CPU? More specifically I have an FX-8350. If I added a second card would I get the full benefit or is a more powerful CPU required to avoid bottlenecking? To be clear, I'm not talking about the normal situation of CPU being the bottleneck, I have heard that crossfire and SLI require CPU involvement in a way that an equivalently powerful single GPU would not. Is this the case? Thanks!
People suggested my CPU (8350) was the reason all my scores with my 295X2 were lower than everyone elses with Intel setups
That's what I'm afraid of. I also have an 8350 and I'm happy with it - nothing appears to be bottlenecked by it. But my understanding is that putting in Xfire isn't like just having a more powerful card - there is a CPU hit. I just don't know if it's large or not.
Even if it is, you're still gonna see considerably better performance with 2 cards when CF works, I had a 290 before the 295X2 and it destroyed the 290s scores And you could look at it like this, when / if you decide to upgrade your chip/board to Intel, you get a free graphics boost too
With that cpu and multi gpu expect a big bottleneck. I would get the fastest single gpu you can afford with that cpu.
That's true. I'm actually thinking I might just sit the next year out in terms of CPU upgrade. Wherever I go from here is a whole new motherboard either way and that's going to be expensive. So I'm thinking of possibly getting a second card as a cheapish way of getting a big boost and I'll save the big costly upgrade for 2016. Thanks.
Well that's always good advice. But like the old joke - you can't get there from here. In my current situation, a second card cross-fired is going to be better economic sense than a single better card, I think.
Sure if you can clock the cpu to around 6ghz or so. A single 970 like eclap suggested is a much better option.
