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Crossfire w/ Laptop & Thunderbolt

ZeKingIII
By ZeKingIII
in Graphics Cards
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Linus got me thinking with his latest video, but is that possible. Say I were to buy a laptop with an rx 580 8gb, would I then be able to use the thunderbolt port's rx 580 8gb in crossfire with it?

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No.
One is a mobile GPU, one is a desktop one.

On the other hand, if you had two eGPUs, it may work

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12 minutes ago, ZeKingIII said:

Linus got me thinking with his latest video, but is that possible. Say I were to buy a laptop with an rx 580 8gb, would I then be able to use the thunderbolt port's rx 580 8gb in crossfire with it?

mobile gpus are technically different cores so unfortunately no, nice idea though! 

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1. CF needs motherboard support. A lot more common than SLI, but you need it nonetheless.

 

2. If 1. is not a problem, then it comes to bandwidth. RX580s use the PCIe bus for CF rather than a connector which is a gift and a curse. The bandwidth from thunderbolt 3 is already limiting GPU performance, using CF at the same time will just make it worse even if there is a card already inside the laptop.

 

As for whether the GPUs have the same cores, that's unfortunately also a problem. In theory CF and SLI can work with cards of different frequency (no matter how much the difference actually is), but AMD and Nvidia sometimes adjust core count for performance or power draw. For example GTX 1080 and 1070 both support SLI, but while mobile 1080s have the same number of CUDA cores as the desktop, the mobile 1070 actually has 128 more so SLI is impossible (even if Nvidia decides to make it 1080s go SLI this way possible).  On AMD's side, the R9 M470X is actually using the desktop RX460's core so that might be possible, but no one has tested yet (for your reference, R9 480M = RX 560-1024 and R9 485X = RX 470)

CPU: i7-2600K 4751MHz 1.44V (software) --> 1.47V at the back of the socket Motherboard: Asrock Z77 Extreme4 (BCLK: 103.3MHz) CPU Cooler: Noctua NH-D15 RAM: Adata XPG 2x8GB DDR3 (XMP: 2133MHz 10-11-11-30 CR2, custom: 2203MHz 10-11-10-26 CR1 tRFC:230 tREFI:14000) GPU: Asus GTX 1070 Dual (Super Jetstream vbios, +70(2025-2088MHz)/+400(8.8Gbps)) SSD: Samsung 840 Pro 256GB (main boot drive), Transcend SSD370 128GB PSU: Seasonic X-660 80+ Gold Case: Antec P110 Silent, 5 intakes 1 exhaust Monitor: AOC G2460PF 1080p 144Hz (150Hz max w/ DP, 121Hz max w/ HDMI) TN panel Keyboard: Logitech G610 Orion (Cherry MX Blue) with SteelSeries Apex M260 keycaps Mouse: BenQ Zowie FK1

 

Model: HP Omen 17 17-an110ca CPU: i7-8750H (0.125V core & cache, 50mV SA undervolt) GPU: GTX 1060 6GB Mobile (+80/+450, 1650MHz~1750MHz 0.78V~0.85V) RAM: 8+8GB DDR4-2400 18-17-17-39 2T Storage: HP EX920 1TB PCIe x4 M.2 SSD + Crucial MX500 1TB 2.5" SATA SSD, 128GB Toshiba PCIe x2 M.2 SSD (KBG30ZMV128G) gone cooking externally, 1TB Seagate 7200RPM 2.5" HDD (ST1000LM049-2GH172) left outside Monitor: 1080p 126Hz IPS G-sync

 

Desktop benching:

Cinebench R15 Single thread:168 Multi-thread: 833 

SuperPi (v1.5 from Techpowerup, PI value output) 16K: 0.100s 1M: 8.255s 32M: 7m 45.93s

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Good to know, guess I'll go with no gpu laptop and two egpu's or somin, lol

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CF is improbably like others have previously stated, but mGPU might be possible. But that is only if a) a game supports dx12's mGPU feature (Which very very few games do, but I digress) and b) there isn't someweird issue that prevents mGPU from working over thunderbolt 3. mGPU would technically allow NVidia and AMD GPUs to work together, but again a game supporting it is extremely unlikely. Definitely not worth trying it out.

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