From 5970 to 6970 crossfire

[VRman]

Some things I noticed since upgrading from a single 5970 to a pair of 6970s in crossfire.

1. I used to connect my 5970 by using two DVI, and one DisplayPort for one of the side screens. If I did not power on the side screens, the card would automatically revert to the single center screen connected with DVI. That was very convenient and the reason why I never bothered with HydraVision. Now my 6970 is connected using one DVI for the center screen, and two DP for the side screens. I now have to power on the side screens or I will not get a proper single screen for the center monitor that is connected with DVI. For the DP monitors it still works if I power off the other two screens, but putting DP in the center is not an option for me unfortunately.

2. One of the reasons I chose AMD Eyefinity over NVIDIA Vision Surround was that I play GRID regularly, which only seems to work properly on a single GPU. With my 5970, the card would "automatically" switch to one GPU for GRID while using two for other games, while with two 6970s I actually have to disable crossfire for GRID to work, which is a pain because everything else works fine for me in crossfire.

Are these differences hardware related or can they be resolved with CCC settings? Thanks!

[Yui]

Upgrading from a 5970 to 6970 crossfire was already a mistake....

[stangflyer]

Upgrading from a 5970 to 6970 crossfire was already a mistake....

Please explain!

[skeeder]

Not sure what he means...from my financial brain I'd agree...but hey.

[Abram]

Does this mean you have some 5970's for sale?

[VRman]

Upgrading from a 5970 to 6970 crossfire was already a mistake....

I'm using 3x30" screens at 7996x1600 so I really needed the 2Gb VRAM. Some demanding games sure run a lot more smoothly now, and I can use higher settings including AA. But I agree that it is not an improvement in every way. I thought that the 5970 is simply crossfire on a single card, but now that I have "real" crossfire I find it comes with a few more issues. I hope this is at least partly because the drivers are still young.

The 6990 could be an interesting card, but figured it may not reach 2x6970 performance due to power/thermal constraints.