Bitcoin Forum

Long story short, I got a little over excited on an online auction site and bought an XFX 5970 with an Arctic Accelero Extreme cooler, an XFX 5850 and I also have my existing flashed 6970 2GB.

I bought these extra cards for Bitcoin mining. I don't think my PSU (Corsair TX950) has enough power to run all these cards under full load, so one of them is going to have to go because I can't afford a bigger PSU and my case only supports 1 PSU.

So I was thinking I could sell the 6970, and use the 5970 for mining and gaming and the 5850 only for mining. Or I could use the 5970 for full time mining and the 5850 for gaming, but the 5850 obviously has less power than the 5970. I could then Crossfire the 5970 + 5850 at a later stage if I wanted to.

The only problem with this is that I will still only have 1GB of usable GPU memory instead of the 2GB that I have with my 6970. I only plan on gaming at 1080p, but I think that future games in the next year or so might benefit from more than 1GB GPU memory.

What should I do?!

Can you crossfire a 5970 with a 5850?

I've done a bit of Googling and it does seem possible to Crossfire a 5970 with a 5850.

Actually, yeah, I am sure you can....they are all 58xx gpus. I know there's trouble with mixing them, but the x9xxs don't really count as they are dual x8xxs.

I think selling the 6970 is not a bad idea as you can get a premium for it now.However,you might want to use the 5970 for mining considering it would mine more and consume less power with a dummy plug.You never know if there next gen ATI cards will have 2gb standard considering and getting a premium now for the 6970 could help there.

It's such a hard choice to make, the 6970 (it's just a flashed 6950) will sell for nearly double what I could get for the 5850, but I don't know if I should sacrifice raw (gaming) performance for extra memory.

If I keep the 6970 and sell the 5850 then I'd use the 5970 for mining 24/7 and use the 6970 as my main card for gaming etc and then I would use the 6970 for mining only when I'm not gaming or watching HD TV on my computer.

If I sell the 6970 and keep the 5850 then I would use the 5970 as my main card for gaming and use it to mine when I don't need all the power along with the 5850.

Either way I'm not selling the 5970 as my bed is next to my computer and if you ask anyone who's ever tried to sleep next to a 6970 with a reference cooler while it's mining you'll know what I mean (the 5970 is pretty quiet due to the aftermarket cooler).

So you are the guy who fuck me in that auction...  :P

Even if you had a beefy enough power supply, running all 3 in an enclosed case you'd have some major heat issues. 

I'd ditch the 5850 if mining is a secondary concern for you, though.  Gaming-wise you're going to get some incredible performance out of the 6970+5970 crossfired.  The 5970 alone is probably 'more than you need' if you were happy with the unlocked 6950.

6970 and 5970 can't be Crossfired. They're a different series of card.

Can having double the GPU power (if I were to eventually Crossfire 5850 with 5970) make up for having half the VRAM?

Ah, didn't realize - linux guy and not much of a gamer, I assumed 'crossfire compatible' was chipset independent.  ATI/AMD dropped the ball and left a lot of value on the table on that imo if 5xxx and 6xxx can't be paired.  Looks like I need to buy some more 5830s for the epic 8-way crossfire I was planning when mining goes kaput ;)

I think you should do a little research on crossfire first.

lol i think i was watching that auction and thinking to myself 'how many other bitcoin miners are bidding on this'

the amount of clueless noob on here amazes me....

The amount of people trying to get under my skin today amazes me.

It was a freakin joke.

So are you guys on TM as well?