Should I Crossfire?

[JonjonLTT]

Hi,
So I have recently changed up my Motherboard for a Gigabyte H97-HD3 and notice that it states it Crossfire ready. Currently I have a Amd Radeon HD 7850 and was wondering if this was worth Crossfiring this, even though the second PCIe slot is only x4.

So the main questions are-
1. How much of a performance hit would the second GPU take from being in a x4 slot instead of x16?
2. Is the 7850 a good card to Crossfire or should I just get a complete upgrade? (bearing in mind I don't have more than about £150/$250 dollars)
3. Would my gaming performance on 2 cards be SIGNIFICANTLY greater than one?
4. Is it worth it or should I stick to one?

PC Spec:
Mobo-Gigabyte H97-HD3
CPU-Intel Core i5 4440
RAM-2x4 GB
SSD-Samsung Evo 128gb
HDD-Western Digital Blue 1TB
PSU-520w

Thanks in advance!

[teddyteddyteddy]

1.  Don't take my word for this, I'm not entirely sure, but I THINK you would be okay with only x4.  if it's pcie 3.0 x4,  then it's the same as pcie 2.0 x8, which means it should be enough for a 7850...

 

2. for $250 you could get an r9 290 which would be a pretty big upgrade

 

3. in some games, performance with 2 cards would be double the performance with 1 card, but some games won't even support crossfire.  It depends on the game.

 

4. depends how much a 7850 costs now.  if it costs a lot, then maybe it's a better idea to get a 290 instead.  

[dizmo]

I'd just sell it and buy a 970. You should have just enough to purchase one.

Plus I'm not entirely sure your PSU is up to two older graphics cards.

[Kc7vwc]

I used to have two 7850s on the Asus M5A97 r2.0 board, and while XFire did provide a boost, is wasn't anywhere near what I would have liked. My FPS didn't really seem to improve, but I was able to up the quality of games a bit.

However, I really hate having to run games in true fullscreen, as I have dual monitors. Also, many of my games just flat didn't support XFire and I had a lot of texture flickering and artifacts.

 

If I remember right, HWiNFO had my second GPU maxed around 70% capacity, so I'm not sure if that's a result of the workload assigned to it, or if that's the PCI socket.

Right now, I believe you could get up to an R9 285 / 280x for around $250, not sure what the pricing is like for the green team.

As teddy said above me, if a second 7850 is cheap enough (IMO, less that $75-100) it might be worth it to stretch the lifespan of your GPUs a bit. But personally, I'd go for the single upgrade if you can.
Pretty sure my wife's R9 270 matched my 7850s for pure FPS, and that's with none of XFire's drawbacks.