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6870 for OS X 6990 CF for Windows Gaming, possible?

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Mar 15, 2011
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Motherboard
P8P67
CPU
i7 2600k
Graphics
HD 6870
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I currently built my hackint0sh for OS X compatibility and therefor made the choice to pick up an 6870 however lets say I'd want to pack some real gaming performance into the same rig (i7 2600k and 16GB ram otherwise so it's pretty speedy) so I don't need to have one OS X rig and one gaming rig could I simply put the two 6990 with the CF bridge into the same system and ignore them under OS X and use the 6870 there and only use them under Windows?

I guess the real question is would it affect the system at all to just have those two cards sitting there in OS X?

I mean all monitors got both VGA, DVI, DP or/and HDMI so I could just connect the monitors to both cards on different inputs. It's much neater to have one multipurpose machine then one machine for most stuff and one only for gaming however it would be to much of a pain to insert the cards every time I want to play some games and remove them when I'm done.
 
First of all several times think do you really need a quad CrossfireX setup with four Radeon chips (two on each 6990), because support of them insn't so good in Windows games.

Later, where is no support for 69XX chips in Snow Leopard and Lion now, I think this chips will be supported, but nobody know when, maybe sometimes in winter, but equal in performance NVidia chips (5XX series) are supported now in upcomming this month OSX Lion. Using them you don't need to install special card only for OSX, and so you can use your system without having to switch input signals from monitor menu.

So I advice you to go with NVidia Geforce GTX 570 or GTX 580 card (or two cards in SLI, if you build a very fast system, single GTX 590 maybe also a nice solution). Quad SLI with two GTX 590 and triple SLI with GTX 570-580 faster in theory, but also has a lot of problems in games, and I think two cards in SLI will be too enough for gaming (even single GTX 570 is a very nice card, and maybe buy one card, then, if you really need more performance and your games really takes advantage of multi-GPUs, buy another).
 
I've already got two 6870 cards, nvidia isn't much of an option as I need at least 4 monitors for my work and with Nvidia I'll have to use twice as many cards to get that setup as I can't put 4 monitors on one nvidia card. Also waiting out support for the 69** series isn't an option. I'm perfectly aware that scaling significantly decreases with higher amount of cards and that game support can sometimes be iffy, I know how different cards perform and all that. Also gaming in 10240*1440 or 7680*1440 does require some more performance then normal single 1080p monitor gaming.

However you never answered my question, is it possible to put two HD 6990 in CF into a HD 6870 Hackint0sh without interference?

Cause I remember having some problems with hackintoshs on a gamingrig way back using an nf 680i Tri-SLI where at the time the only solution were to remove two GeForce 8800 Ultra (I also had the same problem when 780i came out and I wanted to give it another try) which made it very unpractical to use that pc as an hackint0sh, but at least 4 years have passed since that and I figure that stuff must have changed since that.
 
Hi Nurkjon,

Have you come further with this?

I have the same setup in my new pc, but then with one 6990 and one 6870. I bought the 6870 especially for hackint0sh.

I see now that some people got the the 6990 running under hackint0sh, but I haven't installed it yet.

What you are asking is always possible with a setup with an Asus ROG Maximus motherboard. I have the P67 one and they have a little switch on the motherboard to put on or off every PCI-E 16x/8x slot. When I put off the 6990, the bios only sees the 6870, just as windows.
The only disadvantage is that you have to open your rig to turn the switch on or off.

I'm going to install the hackingt0sh now and will try to get the 6870 running along the 6990. If the 6990 will run, then I will sell the 6870 again.

Other question: How did you manage to get 3x a 2 Slot high card into your rig?
 
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