**Upgrading Your PC with Crossfire Configuration**
We have our graphics card on hand, we can go ahead and shut down the system and this is running off an SD so it should shut down pretty quick. You might actually be able to do this real time. What we need to do from there is determine which slots run at full 16x bandwidth to give us the most bandwidth to our graphics cards possible. So, we're going to go ahead and turn off the power supply at the background ourselves out on the power supply before we start working in this case in the Crosshair 4 formula, the one we want to use is this one right here.
So, I'm going to go ahead and take out the PCI covers that are in my case in order to install my graphics card. There we go, those are out. All I need to do is now I already have the cables routed for dual graphics cards cuz I knew I was going to be doing this. Now all I have to do is take my graphics card, position it correctly over the slot, make sure that I'm not putting any unnecessary pressure on the motherboard just making sure that it's sliding right in quite easily. Then I plug in my power connectors so in this case, I have one 8 Pin and one six pin power connector for a 6970.
So go ahead and put that in there, put in the additional one like I said, I've already done the cable management so I don't have to worry too much about how to route those. All right once those are in, then all I need to do is position the card correctly plug in the two or rather plug in screw in the two screws to make sure that it's being held in place. Don't want it to wiggle around if I'm moving my system or transporting it for whatever reason.
It gets knocked over by the cat or whatever happens. Then, I install a Crossfire Bridge. Please note you only need one Crossfire bridge for two-way Crossfire X. Turn my power supply back on press the power button and that was it. That was my crossfire upgrade.
**Configuring Crossfire**
I'll show you guys the software component in just a moment. All right, guys so I've changed my graphics card configuration so it looks like my Infinity Up sort of disappeared that's okay. I'll show you guys how to configure that. So, we go into the Catalyst Control Center and I'm going to go ahead and pull this over to the middle so I can see what I'm doing.
We go into Graphics the first thing we're going to do is go down to Crossfire X and it's that easy. You click apply you check the box and you click apply and then you have enabled Crossfire okay, wait, okay yeah there we go. Whoops I clicked okay so I closed Catalyst Control Center okay so we can go in and check. We can go into Crossfire X yes it is enabled now it's not giving me any error messages so it's working so now what we do is we go into desktops and displays we create a group.
Okay, yeah they belong to Extended desktops that's just fine it'll pop up a message in just a moment which will give me a couple different options for how to create my display group. We're going to do three times one and click accept is the display alignment Arrangement correct uh not quite okay give me a minute to figure this out be back in a moment sorry about that guys the solution was to enable Infinity and set everything up the way we want.
So, we've got our displays grouped here uh we've done our bezel compensation so you can see we're running a resolution of 5904 by 1080 okay and then once that's done then you go in and configure Crossfire X rather than configuring Crossfire and then configuring Infinity so we did get that sorted out. We're going to have some gaming results for you in just a moment and I think you will be pleased with the results.
**Gaming Results**
All right, so you can clearly see right off the bat that our frame rates are higher than they were with a single card with our dual card configuration. So, I'm going to go ahead and play through my time demo here and I'll let you guys know how much faster it runs with Crossfire X.
So, we saw an average of 37.3 frames per second so that is a 50% improvement over the single card configuration with dual cards. Now, that's not really a best case scenario but in some games you get great scaling in other games you don't get as good scaling and in this case it really took us from that point where it was unplayable up to the point where it is smoothly playable.
I died that was entirely my fault I forgot what my melee k key was bound to. But thank you for checking out this episode of NC Tech Tips on how to upgrade your PC with a Crossfire configuration as well as what kind of performance improvement we can expect from using dual graphics cards.
"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwelcome to NCIX Tech tips today's episode is going to be a couple of different things first of all we're going to be doing a crossfire X upgrade guide so we're going to be taking this computer that's behind me I'm actually going to move out of the way so you can see it this computer that's behind me that's our ultimate AMD machine with a six core processor it's an 1100t turbo Black Edition processor we have a rather a 59 a 6970 graph card we've got 4 gigs of Corsair Dominator GT memory with their Dominator airflow fan this is all liquid cooled in the Corsair graphite 600t case and it's powered by an ax850 power supply this is all on a Crosshair 4 formula motherboard and we are going to be showing you guys how to take your already Elite Madness gaming machine and make it even faster by adding an additional graphics card it's actually really simple but before we get started we're going to have a look at a game that I really like this is Battlefield Bad Company 2 it's a quite a demanding game so we're going to go ahead and find some settings and we're going to show you how much of a performance increase you can get on an already tricked out Machine by upgrading to an additional graphics card so we're going to run it at pretty much full detail settings so 8ex anti-aliasing 16 XA everything else on high and let's get started shall we now it actually is going to take me a minute or so to get to the point where I have my pre-recorded run through so I can take a fraps reading so give me just a moment and I'll get up to that town encounter by the way I just want to take a moment to tell you guys that we are trying out the SP 2500 speakers from Corsair for the first time in this episode of NC Tech tips so here hopefully okay the camera did Focus so here I am at my Benchmark Run Spot so I'm going to go ahead and go through this with a single 6970 so you can see up here in the top right corner I'm only running at about 27 frames per second so when I actually Max everything out in this game with triple HD resolution a single 6970 starts to struggle a little bit because we don't even have anything going on right now so I'm going to go ahead and start my recording and we won't be able to check frame rate anymore when that on you nailed it but I'm going to play the game for about 2 minutes get some numbers for you guys and then I will be back to tell you how to upgrade to Crossfire and what kind of a performance Improvement we see okay so up to about this point in my sequence the average frame rate was 24.7 FPS so normally I'd do a few runs and take the average in order to ensure that I'm getting the most accurate possible numbers but uh since we're a little bit time constrained here and we just want General Improvement we're going to go ahead and throw in our other video card and do another run to see how much of a performance Improvement we're able to get by doubling our Graphics horsepower and now I'm dead so the first step when you want to upgrade to Crossfire is to determine a need so in this case the game I play is Battlefield Bad Company 2 my average frame rate is around 25 FPS which I would consider honestly it wasn't really playable it was very difficult for me to get head shot it was very difficult for me to track enemies moving across the screen I found that at triple HD resolution at completely maxed out details the 6970 was not quite able to keep up so we have established we have a need for more Graphics horsepower okay so that's step number one step number two is to make sure that you have all of the right parts now when you're determining a compatible graphics card you can check out the SLI and Crossfire FAQ that I did on my NC Tech tips Channel but here's in a nutshell make sure it's the same graphics card the manufacturer can be XFX and power color vision Tech doesn't matter you can mix and match all that stuff but it has to be the same GPU so in this case we have two 69 70s next you're going to need a crossfire compatible motherboard all AMD dual Graphics motherboards that is a 790 GX 890 GX 890 FX all of those chipsets are Crossfire ready so if you have two 16x slots you're ready to go you will also need a crossfire Bridge as well as a compatible power supply so we have an ax850 power supply this thing is more than capable of anything that we're going to be throwing at it with a system like this so once we've gone through our checklist we have our graphics card on hand we can go ahead and shut down the system and this is running off an SD so it should shut down pretty quick you might actually be able to do this real time and what we need to do from there is determine which slots run at full 16x bandwidth to give us the most bandwidth to our graphics cards possible so we're going to go ahead and turn off the power supply at the back ground ourselves out on the power supply before we start working in this case in the Crosshair 4 formula the one we want to use is this one right here so I'm going to go ahead and take out the PCI covers that are in my case in order to install my graphics card there we go those are out then all I need to do is now I already have the cables routed for dual graphics cards cuz I knew I was going to be doing this now all I have to do is take my graphics card position it correctly over the slot make sure that I'm not putting any unnecessary pressure on the motherboard just making sure that it's sliding right in quite easily then I plug in my power connectors so in this case I have one 8 Pin and one six pin power connector for a 6970 so go ahead and put that in there put in the additional one like I said I've already done the cable management so I don't have to worry too much about how to route those all right once those are in then all I need to do is position the card correctly plug in the two or rather plug in screw in the two screws to make sure that it's being held in place don't want it to wiggle around if I'm moving my system or transporting it for whatever reason it gets knocked over by the cat or whatever happens then I install a crossfire Bridge please note you only need one crossfire bridge for two-way Crossfire X turn my power supply back on press the power button and that was it that was my crossfire upgrade I'll show you guys the software component in just a moment all right guys so I've changed my graphics card configuration so it looks like my ifinity up sort of disappeared that's okay I'll show you guys how to configure that so we go into the Catalyst Control Center and I'm going to go ahead and pull this over to the middle so I can see what I'm doing we go into Graphics the first thing we're going to do is go down to Crossfire X and it's that easy you click apply you check the box and you click apply and then you have enabled Crossfire okay wait okay yeah there we go whoops I clicked okay so I closed Catalyst Control Center okay so we can go in and check we can go into Crossfire X yes it is enabled now it's not giving me any error messages so it's working so now what we do is we go into desktops and displays we create a group okay yes they belong to Extended desktops that's just fine it'll pop up a message in just a moment which will give me a couple different options for how to create my display group we're going to do three times one and click accept is the display alignment Arrangement correct uh not quite okay give me a minute to figure this out be back in a moment sorry about that guys the solution was to enable ifinity and set everything up the way we want so we've got our displays grouped here uh we've done our bezel compensation so you can see we're running a resolution of 5904 by 1080 okay and then once that's done then you go in and configure Crossfire X rather than configuring Crossfire and then configuring ifinity so we did get that sorted out we're going to have some gaming results for you in just a moment and I think you will be pleased with the results all right so you can clearly see right off the bat that our frame rates are higher than they were with a single card with our dual card configuration so I'm going to go ahead and play through my time demo here and I'll let you guys know how much faster it runs with cross fire X all right so we saw an average of 37.3 frames per second so that is a 50% improvement over the single card configuration with dual cards now that's not really a best case scenario but in some games you get great scaling in other games you don't get as good scaling and in this case it really took us from that point where it was unplayable up to the point where it is smoothly playable I died that was entirely my fault I forgot what my melee k key was bound to but thank you for checking out this episode of NC Tech tips on how to upgrade your PC with a crossfire configuration as well as what kind of a performance Improvement we saw at massive resolution in Battlefield Bad Company 2welcome to NCIX Tech tips today's episode is going to be a couple of different things first of all we're going to be doing a crossfire X upgrade guide so we're going to be taking this computer that's behind me I'm actually going to move out of the way so you can see it this computer that's behind me that's our ultimate AMD machine with a six core processor it's an 1100t turbo Black Edition processor we have a rather a 59 a 6970 graph card we've got 4 gigs of Corsair Dominator GT memory with their Dominator airflow fan this is all liquid cooled in the Corsair graphite 600t case and it's powered by an ax850 power supply this is all on a Crosshair 4 formula motherboard and we are going to be showing you guys how to take your already Elite Madness gaming machine and make it even faster by adding an additional graphics card it's actually really simple but before we get started we're going to have a look at a game that I really like this is Battlefield Bad Company 2 it's a quite a demanding game so we're going to go ahead and find some settings and we're going to show you how much of a performance increase you can get on an already tricked out Machine by upgrading to an additional graphics card so we're going to run it at pretty much full detail settings so 8ex anti-aliasing 16 XA everything else on high and let's get started shall we now it actually is going to take me a minute or so to get to the point where I have my pre-recorded run through so I can take a fraps reading so give me just a moment and I'll get up to that town encounter by the way I just want to take a moment to tell you guys that we are trying out the SP 2500 speakers from Corsair for the first time in this episode of NC Tech tips so here hopefully okay the camera did Focus so here I am at my Benchmark Run Spot so I'm going to go ahead and go through this with a single 6970 so you can see up here in the top right corner I'm only running at about 27 frames per second so when I actually Max everything out in this game with triple HD resolution a single 6970 starts to struggle a little bit because we don't even have anything going on right now so I'm going to go ahead and start my recording and we won't be able to check frame rate anymore when that on you nailed it but I'm going to play the game for about 2 minutes get some numbers for you guys and then I will be back to tell you how to upgrade to Crossfire and what kind of a performance Improvement we see okay so up to about this point in my sequence the average frame rate was 24.7 FPS so normally I'd do a few runs and take the average in order to ensure that I'm getting the most accurate possible numbers but uh since we're a little bit time constrained here and we just want General Improvement we're going to go ahead and throw in our other video card and do another run to see how much of a performance Improvement we're able to get by doubling our Graphics horsepower and now I'm dead so the first step when you want to upgrade to Crossfire is to determine a need so in this case the game I play is Battlefield Bad Company 2 my average frame rate is around 25 FPS which I would consider honestly it wasn't really playable it was very difficult for me to get head shot it was very difficult for me to track enemies moving across the screen I found that at triple HD resolution at completely maxed out details the 6970 was not quite able to keep up so we have established we have a need for more Graphics horsepower okay so that's step number one step number two is to make sure that you have all of the right parts now when you're determining a compatible graphics card you can check out the SLI and Crossfire FAQ that I did on my NC Tech tips Channel but here's in a nutshell make sure it's the same graphics card the manufacturer can be XFX and power color vision Tech doesn't matter you can mix and match all that stuff but it has to be the same GPU so in this case we have two 69 70s next you're going to need a crossfire compatible motherboard all AMD dual Graphics motherboards that is a 790 GX 890 GX 890 FX all of those chipsets are Crossfire ready so if you have two 16x slots you're ready to go you will also need a crossfire Bridge as well as a compatible power supply so we have an ax850 power supply this thing is more than capable of anything that we're going to be throwing at it with a system like this so once we've gone through our checklist we have our graphics card on hand we can go ahead and shut down the system and this is running off an SD so it should shut down pretty quick you might actually be able to do this real time and what we need to do from there is determine which slots run at full 16x bandwidth to give us the most bandwidth to our graphics cards possible so we're going to go ahead and turn off the power supply at the back ground ourselves out on the power supply before we start working in this case in the Crosshair 4 formula the one we want to use is this one right here so I'm going to go ahead and take out the PCI covers that are in my case in order to install my graphics card there we go those are out then all I need to do is now I already have the cables routed for dual graphics cards cuz I knew I was going to be doing this now all I have to do is take my graphics card position it correctly over the slot make sure that I'm not putting any unnecessary pressure on the motherboard just making sure that it's sliding right in quite easily then I plug in my power connectors so in this case I have one 8 Pin and one six pin power connector for a 6970 so go ahead and put that in there put in the additional one like I said I've already done the cable management so I don't have to worry too much about how to route those all right once those are in then all I need to do is position the card correctly plug in the two or rather plug in screw in the two screws to make sure that it's being held in place don't want it to wiggle around if I'm moving my system or transporting it for whatever reason it gets knocked over by the cat or whatever happens then I install a crossfire Bridge please note you only need one crossfire bridge for two-way Crossfire X turn my power supply back on press the power button and that was it that was my crossfire upgrade I'll show you guys the software component in just a moment all right guys so I've changed my graphics card configuration so it looks like my ifinity up sort of disappeared that's okay I'll show you guys how to configure that so we go into the Catalyst Control Center and I'm going to go ahead and pull this over to the middle so I can see what I'm doing we go into Graphics the first thing we're going to do is go down to Crossfire X and it's that easy you click apply you check the box and you click apply and then you have enabled Crossfire okay wait okay yeah there we go whoops I clicked okay so I closed Catalyst Control Center okay so we can go in and check we can go into Crossfire X yes it is enabled now it's not giving me any error messages so it's working so now what we do is we go into desktops and displays we create a group okay yes they belong to Extended desktops that's just fine it'll pop up a message in just a moment which will give me a couple different options for how to create my display group we're going to do three times one and click accept is the display alignment Arrangement correct uh not quite okay give me a minute to figure this out be back in a moment sorry about that guys the solution was to enable ifinity and set everything up the way we want so we've got our displays grouped here uh we've done our bezel compensation so you can see we're running a resolution of 5904 by 1080 okay and then once that's done then you go in and configure Crossfire X rather than configuring Crossfire and then configuring ifinity so we did get that sorted out we're going to have some gaming results for you in just a moment and I think you will be pleased with the results all right so you can clearly see right off the bat that our frame rates are higher than they were with a single card with our dual card configuration so I'm going to go ahead and play through my time demo here and I'll let you guys know how much faster it runs with cross fire X all right so we saw an average of 37.3 frames per second so that is a 50% improvement over the single card configuration with dual cards now that's not really a best case scenario but in some games you get great scaling in other games you don't get as good scaling and in this case it really took us from that point where it was unplayable up to the point where it is smoothly playable I died that was entirely my fault I forgot what my melee k key was bound to but thank you for checking out this episode of NC Tech tips on how to upgrade your PC with a crossfire configuration as well as what kind of a performance Improvement we saw at massive resolution in Battlefield Bad Company 2\n"
