Crossfiring different manufacturers

[-Dragon-]

So apparently Asus is stopping production on their 5970 series, at least in the US. I JUST bought one last week at newegg when they finally came in stock for the first time in weeks, and I go back to see if I can get a second and it's listed as "Unavailable" now, not out of stock. It's not even listed as existing on the Asus US home page, global yes, US no.

Are there any challenges I should be aware of doing crossfire with a different manufacturer, such as having to run 2 different sets of OC tools or something? Forgive the ignorance but I'm a recovering nVidia fanboy for the last 5 years and this is the first multi-card GPU setup I've done...

 

[coldstorm]

you can crossfire any manufacture really. you can even crossfire the 5970 with 5870 or 5870 with the 5850. as for asus think they have their rog 5970 coming out latte this year which normal 5970 with 5870 stock clock but those are msrp @ $1000. not really the best buy regardless.

 

[-Dragon-]

It was less of a "is this technically possible", as I was fairly sure it was, and more "how annoying is this going to be with tools and utilities" question. I guess I'll need to look into general OC utilities instead of using the mfg specific ones, unless those work on other mfg cards if they're in the same system as one of their cards...

I did go ahead and jump on a XFX 5970 from newegg since they actually had them in stock, and wasn't sure how long that would last... I'm assuming it works similar to SLI where the drivers slow everything down to the slowest core/memory, so while you CAN do 5870 + 5850, it's no better than 2x 5850, or am I wrong with crossfire?

 

[coldstorm]

well not the same. both will act as they normally wouldn't shouldn't slow down either. so performance wise 5870 crossfire with 5850 will be slight better than 2 5850 but how much better is really the question maybe at most 5-10% improvement over just 5850s.