The AMD Radeon RX 6000 series has finally arrived, and it's time to take a closer look at these two cards that are designed to work together as a Crossfire configuration. The question is, is it worth it? Is it worth spending money on two graphics cards when you could just buy one powerful card instead?

As an indie gamer or someone who primarily plays sidescrollers and mobas, you might not need the high-end performance that these cards offer. In that case, one of these might be more than sufficient for your gaming needs. On the other hand, if you're a fan of games like Starcraft and League of Legends that require maxed-out graphics settings, then two of these might be a better option for you.

However, it's worth noting that AMD has announced an updated driver that addresses some of the issues with Crossfire config and even gives a little bit more performance to Crossfire. This is a positive development, as there was a stigma surrounding AMD drivers in the past. It seems like that might be squashed now, but at the end of the day, it's up to each individual to decide whether or not this configuration is worth it for their specific needs.

Personally, I would always recommend going with the fastest single card you can get, rather than a lower-end Crossfire config. This avoids issues like glitching textures and driver optimization problems. Of course, if you're an enthusiast who likes having multiple graphics cards and thinks it looks cool, then that's something you could do too. But for most people, I would recommend sticking with a single high-end card.

As for water cooling, the AMD Radeon RX 6000 series is compatible with EK water blocks, which are already on their way to me as we speak. This will be interesting to test out and see how well it performs. Usually, I wouldn't recommend water cooling a graphics card this cheap, but who knows? Maybe it'll surprise me.

Now, regarding the PCI slot issue that's been circulating, I have no idea what's going on or why someone started saying that these cards would cause problems with motherboard compatibility. According to PCI Sig, the slots can handle up to 300 watts, so it seems like there should be no issues. However, I didn't experience any problems running two of these and even playing around with overclocking, so who knows? Maybe I'll set up a low-end test rig to see if anything goes pop under load.

Overall, the AMD Radeon RX 6000 series is an exciting development for graphics enthusiasts, and it will be interesting to see how they perform in real-world tests. If you're considering adding one of these cards to your system, be sure to do some research and read up on the latest benchmarks and reviews to get a better understanding of whether or not this configuration is right for you.

One last thing - I'd like to thank everyone who's been asking me about these cards and what I think about them. It's always great to hear from my viewers and get their feedback. And as always, have a great day!

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: ennow ever since AMD teased their ashes a singularity Benchmark showing that two of these guys at just under 2/3 the price of a single GTX 1080 Founders Edition was actually beating it so obviously people have ran with that saying that that means that two of these are better than a 1080 in pretty much every instance well let's go ahead and find out today on whether or not that's true because fortunately I've now got my hand on two of these little beasts what are you doing I thought time for an upgrade that's Little J's Xbox ah much better how did you even get in here it's made a key last time I was here no big deal really could go for a drink right about now though I kind of feel like you've already done this whole living room thing before no that's a different Channel these are horrible man well you are breaking and entering no I'm not I have witnesses the new defined Nan s from fractal design supports full-size power supplies full length graphics cards room for a complete custom water loop and heck even room for a couple of freeloaders click the link in the description for more details fractal Josh not included we should order pizza now a couple things to kind of get out of the way here first of all I want to say huge thank you to Ed over at techsource for sending me his RX 480 because as you guys know we were all sent one of these and that kind of made a lot of people in the public really like what the heck man AMD showed these Crossfire results and they didn't send anybody two cards and uh that means we couldn't test it so I reached out Ed responded and uh pretty much right away he like responded immediately saying hey man you can borrow my card uh so I was like sure absolutely so do me a favor guys look in the description check out the link to his channel check out his rx40 review he's also going to be doing a crossfire uh review cuz I'll be sending him my card in exchange you know for scratch my back cuz that itch is it's been itching for a while and I couldn't reach it and he got that for me cuz you know he's a bro so anyway I'm going to send him my card and you guys can see the same results over on his channel as well um the other thing to mention here is there's obviously been a lot of controversy especially on Reddit over the last couple of days about power consumption on this guy and PCI uh Sig standards and whether or not it's pulling too much power through the motherboard I'm not going to comment on that because it's obviously a very deep issue I I don't know obviously a whole lot about it but there's a lot of controversy saying it's out of spec and other people are chiming in saying no it's in Spec and then supposedly PCI Sig said no it's fine there's no problems there's no issues here it's not going to damage your motherboard so I don't know um so I don't even want to comment on that but I will say that I did not run into any sort of Hardware issue with running two of these for well what two days now uh in crossfire comp comp config yeah I guess Crossfire could be kind of a config if you look at power consumption depending on which card you're using but any anyway um I digress that's that's pointless we're not going to talk about that today because that's just uh admittedly an issue that's much deeper than my comprehension on the standards for PCI slot power draw but I will say that I did not run into any issues while doing my testing and it also goes to show that apparently if you look at any cards power draw almost all of them pull more than 75 Watts from the PCI slot and then if you overclock it you pull even more than that so if you've ever overclocked a card guess what you've pretty much gone out of standard so there's that anyway enough of that let's go ahead and get into results and then we'll talk about this and whether or not it's even worth to consider doing that's always the point of these videos is it worth it transition okay so as you guys could see by looking at the benchmarks these two cards lived just in the shadow of the GTX 1080 Founders Edition and was nipping at its heels the entire time now some people look at that and go see see there was a lie it was a lie no it wasn't a lie because they only showed asynchronous compute game like ashes of the singularity which we know AMD is better at so I didn't actually test that because again I don't know how to use the damn Benchmark and I'm willing to admit it I keep getting extremely sporadic results sometimes FPS down into the 30s while running 1080p so again that's why I didn't want to use the Benchmark I just it it's confusing to me and I'm too stupid to figure it out so that's why I just stuck to my usual lineup of like GTA5 and crisis and Witcher and Far Cry and a good mixture of both Nvidia and AMD titles obviously fire strike is in there this thing has the highest score amongst the entire configs I tested in fire strike but as you guys know you can't take a synthetic Benchmark like fire strike and convert it to Real World experience when it comes to games synthetic benchmarks don't use nearly as much RAM they use nearly as much CPU and they also scale nearly perfectly but that doesn't mean the developers have scaled it when it comes to the games so that's why my Tes testing methodology is the way that it is but also one thing to keep in mind too is yeah this thing did not exceed the GTX 1080 in pretty much any of the games that I tried out but it was right there it was like literally biting the heels like a rabid Chihuahua at the the GTX 1080 the entire time at just under 2/3 the cost that's the thing that's actually worth mentioning these come in at $478 in a crossfire config $239 MSRP for the 8 GB model nipping at the freaking heels of a GTX 1080 for uh considerably considerably less over $200 less that's a big deal you could buy you could buy two of these for one rig and another one for another computer for less than it would cost for a single GTX 1080 Founders Edition and that's kind of a big deal to me but one other thing to also mention is these were running at stock speeds so if you overclock these the extra 100 MHz they were capable of then it does go just past the 1080 but if you overclock the 1080 on the flip side which we all know it's very good at then it pulls even farther ahead like way farther ahead but again for something that costs more you would kind of expect it to do better I would hope anyway one other thing to also mention though is although these were better than a single 1070 in pretty much every instance they do cost about $40 to $50 more than than a 1070 so that's also something worth keeping in mind and you're going to use a lot more power because these cards are about 160 Watts a piece just over the 150 TDP they advertise depending on whether or not it gets to ramp up or fan speed that there are things at play there so these do consume about twice the amount of power as a GTX 1070 which means more heat in the room and more noise now I didn't mention uh thermals and I didn't mention noise because blower style coolers like this from AMD they suck they really do suck in fact blower styles in General are loud and they're extremely inefficient at their method of cooling so we just need to wait for board partner cards to come out with their multifan configurations to see how they really stack up which is nice because that means you have more overclocking Headroom with better temperatures especially on AMD and uh that means the Acoustics are also going to come down quite a bit but these sounded like a freaking ac130 going down the the runway when these were under load they were really loud but also too one thing to keep in mind my motherboard configuration for Crossfire instead of having dual slot spacing like that forc them to be like this so this card did get up to 85c underload but it didn't throttle it stayed at 1266 so that's a good thing so that really brings us into the portion about whether or not it's worth it and you've got to ask yourself what games do you play are you primarily an indie gamer are you a sidescroller do you play mobas do you play games that typically just don't require a lot of demand from your graphics card if that's true then two of these might not be the best option for you one of them would be more than sufficient to play games like Starcraft and League of Legends and all that with all settings maxed all the eye candy up and have a great gaming experience but that also means you'd never even consider something like a 1080 if that was your gaming expectation anyway but I am really pleased to see that it scaled very very well on the AAA titles that I played with now there that's not to say though that it was completely bug-free uh in Crisis 3 on 4K I was getting some weird textures on the water uh with with some really weird flickering that was only there in 4K it wasn't there in 3 in 1440 and it wasn't there in 1080 and it was the only game that I had any sort of issue with but actually before filming this video but after doing my testing I did get notification from AMD that they actually have an updated driver to actually address uh some Crossfire config stuff and even give a little bit more performance to Crossfire so we're already seeing drivers pumped out from amds Camp which is a good thing because there was always this huge stigma of ah the AMD driver suck and then the next year it's like oh the Nvidia driers suck and then the next year it's like oh both companies drivers suck and AMD was actually pretty bad with going a long time for a while there with no wickle certified drivers and only dealing with betas and lots of bugs but it seems like that might be squared away but at the end of the day I can't say whether or not this is worth it to you you're going to just have to see the benchmarks that are out there look at everyone doing crossfire testing and look at the games they're using the settings they're using and try and determine if you can get a better gaming experience versus what you have now with two of these personally I would always recommend if you're on a budget going with the fast fastest single card you can get versus any sort of lower-end Crossfire config I never personally recommend going with two lower cards in place of a single high-end card because you introduce things like the glitching textures like I just showed you with crisis or you deal with driver optimization or you dral with the devs are the devs even going to code for Crossfire you know it's one of those things where the single card you're always supported but if you're just an Enthusiast and you like having multiple graphics cards and you think it looks cool then that's something you could do too you know and are these going to actually be supported for water cooling that's another thing people ask me um yes they are actually I have EK water blocks on the way right now as we speak so I can actually do some water cooling testing on this which is going to be interesting because I also usually never recommend water cooling a graphics card this cheap I would usually recommend taking the extra hundred bucks the block cost and putting it into a better card but who knows might as well test it since it's on the way but anyway guys tell me what you thought about this again when it comes to the PCI slot thing let let that one play out I have no idea I have I have no idea the players involved there I have no idea who even like started this rumor or why I don't think it's going to blow up your motherboard based on what PCI Sig is saying that the slot the slots apparently are good for up to 300 watts and someone was saying that in Tech talk the other night but I don't know enough about that standard to say it's going to hurt anything I didn't experience any any issues with running two of these and even playing around with overclocking so who knows maybe I'll set up a low-end test rig like a budget motherboard and a budget CPU and set it up and just let it run and loop underload and see if anything goes pop and Sizzle I don't think anything will but maybe that's worth a test hit like if you want me to do that test anyway guys thanks for watching I'll see you in the next video and as always have a great day actually normally I say as always see you in the next video but I want you guys to have a great day damn it it's the weekend enjoy it all right see you in the next one I just kicked the camera Amateur hour at its bestnow ever since AMD teased their ashes a singularity Benchmark showing that two of these guys at just under 2/3 the price of a single GTX 1080 Founders Edition was actually beating it so obviously people have ran with that saying that that means that two of these are better than a 1080 in pretty much every instance well let's go ahead and find out today on whether or not that's true because fortunately I've now got my hand on two of these little beasts what are you doing I thought time for an upgrade that's Little J's Xbox ah much better how did you even get in here it's made a key last time I was here no big deal really could go for a drink right about now though I kind of feel like you've already done this whole living room thing before no that's a different Channel these are horrible man well you are breaking and entering no I'm not I have witnesses the new defined Nan s from fractal design supports full-size power supplies full length graphics cards room for a complete custom water loop and heck even room for a couple of freeloaders click the link in the description for more details fractal Josh not included we should order pizza now a couple things to kind of get out of the way here first of all I want to say huge thank you to Ed over at techsource for sending me his RX 480 because as you guys know we were all sent one of these and that kind of made a lot of people in the public really like what the heck man AMD showed these Crossfire results and they didn't send anybody two cards and uh that means we couldn't test it so I reached out Ed responded and uh pretty much right away he like responded immediately saying hey man you can borrow my card uh so I was like sure absolutely so do me a favor guys look in the description check out the link to his channel check out his rx40 review he's also going to be doing a crossfire uh review cuz I'll be sending him my card in exchange you know for scratch my back cuz that itch is it's been itching for a while and I couldn't reach it and he got that for me cuz you know he's a bro so anyway I'm going to send him my card and you guys can see the same results over on his channel as well um the other thing to mention here is there's obviously been a lot of controversy especially on Reddit over the last couple of days about power consumption on this guy and PCI uh Sig standards and whether or not it's pulling too much power through the motherboard I'm not going to comment on that because it's obviously a very deep issue I I don't know obviously a whole lot about it but there's a lot of controversy saying it's out of spec and other people are chiming in saying no it's in Spec and then supposedly PCI Sig said no it's fine there's no problems there's no issues here it's not going to damage your motherboard so I don't know um so I don't even want to comment on that but I will say that I did not run into any sort of Hardware issue with running two of these for well what two days now uh in crossfire comp comp config yeah I guess Crossfire could be kind of a config if you look at power consumption depending on which card you're using but any anyway um I digress that's that's pointless we're not going to talk about that today because that's just uh admittedly an issue that's much deeper than my comprehension on the standards for PCI slot power draw but I will say that I did not run into any issues while doing my testing and it also goes to show that apparently if you look at any cards power draw almost all of them pull more than 75 Watts from the PCI slot and then if you overclock it you pull even more than that so if you've ever overclocked a card guess what you've pretty much gone out of standard so there's that anyway enough of that let's go ahead and get into results and then we'll talk about this and whether or not it's even worth to consider doing that's always the point of these videos is it worth it transition okay so as you guys could see by looking at the benchmarks these two cards lived just in the shadow of the GTX 1080 Founders Edition and was nipping at its heels the entire time now some people look at that and go see see there was a lie it was a lie no it wasn't a lie because they only showed asynchronous compute game like ashes of the singularity which we know AMD is better at so I didn't actually test that because again I don't know how to use the damn Benchmark and I'm willing to admit it I keep getting extremely sporadic results sometimes FPS down into the 30s while running 1080p so again that's why I didn't want to use the Benchmark I just it it's confusing to me and I'm too stupid to figure it out so that's why I just stuck to my usual lineup of like GTA5 and crisis and Witcher and Far Cry and a good mixture of both Nvidia and AMD titles obviously fire strike is in there this thing has the highest score amongst the entire configs I tested in fire strike but as you guys know you can't take a synthetic Benchmark like fire strike and convert it to Real World experience when it comes to games synthetic benchmarks don't use nearly as much RAM they use nearly as much CPU and they also scale nearly perfectly but that doesn't mean the developers have scaled it when it comes to the games so that's why my Tes testing methodology is the way that it is but also one thing to keep in mind too is yeah this thing did not exceed the GTX 1080 in pretty much any of the games that I tried out but it was right there it was like literally biting the heels like a rabid Chihuahua at the the GTX 1080 the entire time at just under 2/3 the cost that's the thing that's actually worth mentioning these come in at $478 in a crossfire config $239 MSRP for the 8 GB model nipping at the freaking heels of a GTX 1080 for uh considerably considerably less over $200 less that's a big deal you could buy you could buy two of these for one rig and another one for another computer for less than it would cost for a single GTX 1080 Founders Edition and that's kind of a big deal to me but one other thing to also mention is these were running at stock speeds so if you overclock these the extra 100 MHz they were capable of then it does go just past the 1080 but if you overclock the 1080 on the flip side which we all know it's very good at then it pulls even farther ahead like way farther ahead but again for something that costs more you would kind of expect it to do better I would hope anyway one other thing to also mention though is although these were better than a single 1070 in pretty much every instance they do cost about $40 to $50 more than than a 1070 so that's also something worth keeping in mind and you're going to use a lot more power because these cards are about 160 Watts a piece just over the 150 TDP they advertise depending on whether or not it gets to ramp up or fan speed that there are things at play there so these do consume about twice the amount of power as a GTX 1070 which means more heat in the room and more noise now I didn't mention uh thermals and I didn't mention noise because blower style coolers like this from AMD they suck they really do suck in fact blower styles in General are loud and they're extremely inefficient at their method of cooling so we just need to wait for board partner cards to come out with their multifan configurations to see how they really stack up which is nice because that means you have more overclocking Headroom with better temperatures especially on AMD and uh that means the Acoustics are also going to come down quite a bit but these sounded like a freaking ac130 going down the the runway when these were under load they were really loud but also too one thing to keep in mind my motherboard configuration for Crossfire instead of having dual slot spacing like that forc them to be like this so this card did get up to 85c underload but it didn't throttle it stayed at 1266 so that's a good thing so that really brings us into the portion about whether or not it's worth it and you've got to ask yourself what games do you play are you primarily an indie gamer are you a sidescroller do you play mobas do you play games that typically just don't require a lot of demand from your graphics card if that's true then two of these might not be the best option for you one of them would be more than sufficient to play games like Starcraft and League of Legends and all that with all settings maxed all the eye candy up and have a great gaming experience but that also means you'd never even consider something like a 1080 if that was your gaming expectation anyway but I am really pleased to see that it scaled very very well on the AAA titles that I played with now there that's not to say though that it was completely bug-free uh in Crisis 3 on 4K I was getting some weird textures on the water uh with with some really weird flickering that was only there in 4K it wasn't there in 3 in 1440 and it wasn't there in 1080 and it was the only game that I had any sort of issue with but actually before filming this video but after doing my testing I did get notification from AMD that they actually have an updated driver to actually address uh some Crossfire config stuff and even give a little bit more performance to Crossfire so we're already seeing drivers pumped out from amds Camp which is a good thing because there was always this huge stigma of ah the AMD driver suck and then the next year it's like oh the Nvidia driers suck and then the next year it's like oh both companies drivers suck and AMD was actually pretty bad with going a long time for a while there with no wickle certified drivers and only dealing with betas and lots of bugs but it seems like that might be squared away but at the end of the day I can't say whether or not this is worth it to you you're going to just have to see the benchmarks that are out there look at everyone doing crossfire testing and look at the games they're using the settings they're using and try and determine if you can get a better gaming experience versus what you have now with two of these personally I would always recommend if you're on a budget going with the fast fastest single card you can get versus any sort of lower-end Crossfire config I never personally recommend going with two lower cards in place of a single high-end card because you introduce things like the glitching textures like I just showed you with crisis or you deal with driver optimization or you dral with the devs are the devs even going to code for Crossfire you know it's one of those things where the single card you're always supported but if you're just an Enthusiast and you like having multiple graphics cards and you think it looks cool then that's something you could do too you know and are these going to actually be supported for water cooling that's another thing people ask me um yes they are actually I have EK water blocks on the way right now as we speak so I can actually do some water cooling testing on this which is going to be interesting because I also usually never recommend water cooling a graphics card this cheap I would usually recommend taking the extra hundred bucks the block cost and putting it into a better card but who knows might as well test it since it's on the way but anyway guys tell me what you thought about this again when it comes to the PCI slot thing let let that one play out I have no idea I have I have no idea the players involved there I have no idea who even like started this rumor or why I don't think it's going to blow up your motherboard based on what PCI Sig is saying that the slot the slots apparently are good for up to 300 watts and someone was saying that in Tech talk the other night but I don't know enough about that standard to say it's going to hurt anything I didn't experience any any issues with running two of these and even playing around with overclocking so who knows maybe I'll set up a low-end test rig like a budget motherboard and a budget CPU and set it up and just let it run and loop underload and see if anything goes pop and Sizzle I don't think anything will but maybe that's worth a test hit like if you want me to do that test anyway guys thanks for watching I'll see you in the next video and as always have a great day actually normally I say as always see you in the next video but I want you guys to have a great day damn it it's the weekend enjoy it all right see you in the next one I just kicked the camera Amateur hour at its best\n"