CrossFire with HD3850/3870 and HD4850/4870....Possible ??? Maybe !!!!

I saw this news thread from last year that said that for the desktop version they speculated that you might be able to do a crossfire with the 3800 and 4800 series cards. An example would be using a HD3850 and a HD4850 in crossfire. They say that there is a possibility to even do crossfire with and HD3870x2 and a HD4850. So what are the possiblities that this can translate to laptops / notebooks also ?? What if the current laptops / notebooks that have the ATI HD3870 CF and when the HD4870's come out, one might be able to SLOWLY upgrade one card at a time. If this is true, this would be an excellent selling point for ATI. Enjoy !!! God Bless


http://www.tomshardware.com/news/ATI-Radeon-4850,5728.html

 

I'm not positive.... But I really doubt it at least as far as the laptops are concerned (May I be corrected) I hope so, because that would be incredible

 

I'm quite certain for SLI/Crossfire, you need the exact same card, doesn't matter the manufacturer though.

If this was true, it would be very nice if I could buy a GTX 295 and SLI it with my current GTX 285 in my desktop and my brother can purchase an HD4890 to compliment his HD4850 in his desktop. This way, the existing card would not go to waste.

 

SLi requires the exact same cards. CrossfireX requires the same GPU architecture so you can't mix 3800 series cards with 4800 series cards but you can mix a 4850 with a 4870 (or 4890 in a desktop).

 

I believe SLi only works with odd GPUs if the odd one is a dedicated physics card..

 

So my brother could CrossfireX his 4850 with a 4870 or 4890? That is great news and shame on Nvidia for not doing that with SLI. I like that Crossfire works with most Intel chipsets whereas SLI requires and SLI capable chipset, lame. Does CrossfireX need a special chipset?

Only reason I had gone with the GTX 285 was for Physx but barely any games make use of it. I'm slightly regretting going with Nvidia.

 

Yes...he can even match his 4850 with a 4870x2 card. The only issue I believe is the VRAM on the card. If your 4850 has 512Mb and you match it with a 4870 that has 1Gb then your 4870 will only use a max of 512Mb.

 

Yea. That would be cool. But im pretty sure they have to be the same card. Its hard for the computer to assign what tasks/drawing to what if the cards are completely different. They would have to have the computer some how evaluate them or combine their powers and use it as a single card. But thats too much software/instructions to perform quickly or efficently without a drastic loss. However if they did get it to work somehow, well then hell, wow.

Its a neat idea, but not really needed. But I see how it could be a big selling point.