candle_86 wrote:yes im aware of the older crossfire, but 16+4 was not a good method for crossfire, it might have been fine for the x850, but con […]
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yes im aware of the older crossfire, but 16+4 was not a good method for crossfire, it might have been fine for the x850, but considering that by the time crossfire was readily available the x1800XT was almost ready to go was largely ignored, because the 7800GTX was out and offered more performance. But to continue the x850 could saturate an AGP4x bus and showed improved speed on AGP 8x, and considering PCIe 1.0/1.1 4x operates @ 1gb/s which is the same speed as AGP 4x it's sufficent to rule out any 16x4 solutions, meaning for pentium 4 no real viable crossfire solution besides ATI's own existed, and the express 1150 aka express 200 was even more buggy than nforce 4 on intel it really pushed anyone wanting to play at the highend to AMD. As for the argument agasint SLI/Xfire, I've ran it quite a few times on current gen hardware.
2007 HD3870+HD3850 crossfire (preformed terribly, I lost preformance in most games, and the gpu's where paired with an Athlon 64 X2 6000)
2011 GTX 560 Ti 448 SLI (ran wonderfully, no issues paired with i5 2500k)
2012 GTX 670 Triple SLI (ran wonderfully, paired with i7 3930k{had to sell this machine when I was out of work for 4 months})
Each one but the crossfire worked wonderfully, and if you bought multi gpu when current it made alot of sense. to run at 1200p in 2004 you needed SLI, to run at 1600p you had to have SLI/Crossfire in 2006, and today nothing can drive a game at 4k outside of SLI.
Again, not entirely accurate. AGP 4x and x4 PCIe cannot be directly compared 1:1. As far as non-16+16 configurations, it isn't always detrimental. Tom's has tested "PCIe scaling" a variety of times over the years, including with CrossFire:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/crossfire … ess,2095-5.html
It also isn't the GPU that "saturates" a given bus - it's the application's demand. In other words, saying "X850 can saturate AGP 4x" makes no sense - instead, there are games that can see benefit from higher bandwidth to the GPU, and others that will not (which you can also see in the CF review, where P965 CF can outperform PCIe 2.0 single-card with some applications, but not with others).
Xpress 200CF was also never released for Intel - that's an AMD exclusive platform. ATi did not release CF for Intel until the Xpress 3200CF. The 200CF for AMD is a fine chipset IME.
Finally, "1200p in 2004" wasn't really a big consideration - Steam h/w survey data from back then generally showed 1024x768 as the most common resolution, but depending on the game 1920x1200 (or more likely 1600x1200) is entirely functional with older cards, no SLI/CF is required (even GeForce 2 Ultra can accomplish that, depending on the game). The same reasoning applies to 2560x1600 and 4K gaming - it depends on the game as much as it does on the hardware. Sure, you can (and I suspect probably will) link me to reviews that show cards like 290X or GTX 690 having trouble with a game like Watch_dogs on maximum settings not getting 100 FPS at 4K, but that doesn't mean they can't run any game at 4K. It's also worth pointing out that just as 1920x1200 wasn't very common in 2004, it's not like every and their grandmother has 4K displays in 2015.
It's unfortunate to hear you've had a bad experience with CrossFire, but it isn't fair to say that your experience is a representation of all configurations, systems, etc (just as there is no "all gamers did..." or "all enthusiasts wanted..." kind of statement that can be made as a blanket). 😊
Skyscraper wrote:All HT capable Pentium 4 should be able to run Youtube 480p with only CPU decoding.
The top Prescotts (3.6 and 3.8 ) should handle Youtube 720P.
This is using Flash, HTML5 seems to perform worse so far. If the board has a PCI-E X16 slot then like other members suggested get a low power card like the AMD HD 5450, they usally sell for ~$5.
Dual Prestonias with HT can handle 720p and 1080p, albeit very inefficiently (power consumption is massive).
calvin wrote:I'm very sure the AGP NVidia cards can't decode video on Linux. Even then, if you must go P4/C2, go on a PCIe chipset/board. Modern GPUs are really good nowadays, despite them wanting two brackets. (and they're getting a lot better about that)
What kind of video? They should support MPEG-2/h.264 (depending on the card's actual capabilities ofc), but none of that means "will decode Flash."
Unknown_K wrote:Did anyone make a dual P4 motherboard? I love my old Dual Opteron boards, they are very solid and RAM is cheap.
No, nothing that will take a pair of Socket 423 or 478 chips - just like there aren't boards that can take a pair of Socket 754 or 939 chips. There are, however, multi-socket NetBurst boards that use Socket 603 or Socket 604, as well as a variety of CPUs available (many of them have more cache than Pentium 4 as well). AGP and PCIe (including SLI) equipped variants exist on dual-socket platforms, such as the Asus PC-DL Deluxe, NCCH-DL Deluxe, and Iwill DN800SLI.