Questions about quad mining rig

[Meman]

Hello forum members

I plan to build a 4x Sapphire HD 5850 Xtreme mining rig, so there are some Questions

1. can i mine with all 4 GPU's under Windows 7, if there are no dummy plugs or crossfire bridges connected?
2. can i mine with all 4 GPU's, if there is a quad-crossfire setup?
3. does a crossfire setup increase or decrease Mhash/s value compared to non-crossfire?
4. does a crossfire setup increase or decrease power consumption (while mining) compared to non-crossfire?
5. can i mine with more than 2 GPU's under windows XP?
6. does windows XP increase the Mhash/s value compared to later windows versions?

thx for reading
Meman

[bcpokey]

1. Yes but it will be a pain in the ass. You have to plug in monitor, overclock, start mining. Unplug monitor switch cards, repeat. And every time a miner crashes or you restart you have to do it again.

2. Yes you can, there are some problems with crossfire that I don't recall offhand, but as I remember it lowers your hashrate and can be buggy. Someone else will have to give you more details though.

3. See above

4. Crossfire does not change power consumption.

5. Yep.

6. No it does not. All windows versions should mine at roughly the same pace, if you disable aero and all the graphical desktop crap and don't watch a lot of movies and things.

[snoopytime]

I am sooper new at this, 3 days into it only . . but I had most of the same questions. So far I found out:  

in windows, you gotta have crossfire or dummy plugs. Crossfire slows shit down retarted. So make dummy plugs, its easy as shit. Go to radio shack and get 68 ohm; 1/2 watt resitors. I just did today, a 5-pak is $1.19. Then just bend 3 and stick them in the adapter, it seriously takes 2mins

[Meman]

Thank you for the fast and competent answers! It helped me alot.