Sapphire Xpress3200 mobo - Crossfire cards supported?

[Hellbat]

Hi, new to the forum - was just wondering if anyone had some links to sites or info. with regards to what new cards are supported on this mobo.

It is a Sapphire 3200 Express with a 580X chipset - and an AM2 5000X2 Cpu. I currently run an ATI Radeon X1800XT in it - but wanna boost it a bit and was thinking of actually making use of the Crossfire support before I change the mobo in a year or so.

The details in what other cards are supported in a Crossfire config with the current X1800 is sketchy at best - Should I just flog the X1800 and go for 2 HD 3900 series cards - or is there something that can run with the 1800 - I'm very happy with the performance of the 1800 on it's own - but Crysis demands a bit more than the card can handle on high settings...

Any advice would be appreciated.

[Flying Fox]

Welcome to the forums.

Buying another X1800 is definitely not a good idea. As for Crysis, nothing really can play it at high res with all the details turned on at ridiculous fps anyway, so might as well wait a little. What game resolutions are you running?

[JustAnEngineer]

This comes back to one of the great fallacies about SLI/Crossfire as an upgrade path.


SLI/Crossfire is not a good way to upgrade. By the time that you want more performance than your Radeon X1800 can provide, you are better off buying a new Radeon HD3570 (or GeForce 8800GT / GTS 512MB) instead of another obsolete card.

[Hellbat]

Welcome to the forums.

Buying another X1800 is definitely not a good idea. As for Crysis, nothing really can play it at high res with all the details turned on at ridiculous fps anyway, so might as well wait a little. What game resolutions are you running?

Thanks - I mostly run my games at 1024x768 (19" LCD).

Played Crysis and anything higher than medium is not good ...

(I've looked at the HD3570 - and see that it requires PCI-X 2.0 (for the life of me can not find the detailed specs on the mobo - just says it supports PCI-X - dual lanes - for Crossfire mode).

Thanks for the advice - will have to read up a bit more on the subject before making any descisions...

[Flying Fox]

(I've looked at the HD3570 - and see that it requires PCI-X 2.0 (for the life of me can not find the detailed specs on the mobo - just says it supports PCI-X - dual lanes - for Crossfire mode).

The official short form for PCI Express is PCIe. And no, the HD 3x70 does not require PCIe 2.0, it supports PCIe 2.0. And part of the PCIe 2.0 spec is to be backwards compatible with PCIe 1.1. So don't worry about it. There is no real world performance difference yet between the 2.

[GeForce6200]

A HD 3870 will work fine in your motherboard. PCI-E 2.0 is backwards compatable with PCI-E1.0, which your board supports.