To crossfire or not ?

[Baron]

I have a pair of 4870X2's mounted in the first two 16x pci-e slots with the crossfire bridge.
How would it affect performance if I put the 2nd card down onto the 8x slot near the bottom of the motherboard disabling crossfire ? (to aid cooling)
What will the 2nd card be doing as it is not then helping its brother in crossfire ?.

The reason I ask is that having 2 cards jam-packed together makes them run a bit hot.............I hold down the temps when gaming by raising the fans on each card to around 75% keeping temps down to about 50C, otherwise they creep up to around 70-80C. and just worried about the longevity of the cards as it will be when a blue moon appears before I will be able to buy new gfx cards

Thanks in advance for any info.

[Zero82z]

If you remove your second card from the Crossfire configuration, naturally your performance will then only be what you get from a single card. You may as well just take the second card out of your system altogether in that case.

[mockingbird]

Benchmarks have shown that 8x8 crossfires are just as fast as 16x16 crossfires. Why don't you try to find a longer crossfire bridge, maybe you can get the crossfire to work with one of the cards in that 8x slot.

[Baron]

Many thanks for the replies.
Yep I have read that running as 8x8 in CF doesn't show any noticeable drop in performance.
I shall have a look for a 100mm CF bridge, as I believe they can be bought.

[x.clay]

MSI makes some long crossfire bridges. You can probably find some on e-bay. From everything I have read there isn't a significant hit between 16/16 and 8/8.

[Baron]

Got a 100m bridge off ebay, and mounted the 2nd card in the 3rd pci-e slot.

I have not noticed any degradation in performance, but I have noticed a little drop in temp's of the two cards.......I think my two cards love me a bit more now that there is plenty of space between the two.............well worth the investment of a few pounds...

[walterm]

I have no idea if they would benefit cooling but they are cheap. I'm thinkinking the slot coolers might help? Anyone have any opinions?
These are exhaust blowers that fit in expansion slot. Or do they just interfere with airflow?

[allikat]

I have no idea if they would benefit cooling but they are cheap. I'm thinkinking the slot coolers might help? Anyone have any opinions?
These are exhaust blowers that fit in expansion slot. Or do they just interfere with airflow?

This depends on how your airflow is configured really. And most of these blowers are pretty much junk anyway.