To Crossfire or Not to Crossfire?

[yoratool69]

Hey guys,

I just bought a 2nd Gigabyte Radeon HD 4870 1GB Zalman card to run in crossfire with my current one.

I have the Gigabyte x58 UD5 board, so when I put them both in the 16x slots they are almost touching each other.

I am really keen to get them running together but not too sure about the heat factor. My PSU sits at the bottom of the case and with the cooler on the card, wont allow for the bottom PCIE slot(8X) slot to be used either .

Any suggestions, besides a motherboard change

 

[EXCellR8]

well the cards might produce a bit of heat inside the case w/o the reference cooler, i'm unfamiliar with the design of zalman's cooler for the 4870. it probably won't be too bad if you have decent enough airflow in there but without some kind of exhaust it could get a bit toasty. the 4870 isn't an ideal choice for aftermarket cooling, especially in a CF configuration but I think you'll be alright. if not you could always buy different coolers or apply some better thermal compound to each core.

...and on a side note i highly recommend ATI Tray Tools over CCC to enable/disable your CrossFire, it doesn't really matter but I ran into a couple problems in CCC before. with ATT it's been smooth sailing. just a suggestion...