Check that your power supply offers enough connectors, or that you have converters on hand. Each video card will have two power connectors, either 6 or 8 pin. Sometimes more than that! Be absolutely sure you have a quality power supply rated for a minimum of 600 watts. Warning: modern gaming video cards are major power hogs - they easily pull 100 to 200 watts under load. A power supply with enough headroom to drive two video cards.Most aftermarket and enthusiast motherboards have this, but if you bought a system from say, Dell, it's less clear. A motherboard that has two video card capable PCI Express slots.Anyway, for this to work, you'll need to establish a few things about your computer before rushing out and buying that second video card. You may recognize this computer as a further tweaked version of my last build (which is still awesome, by the way, and highly recommended). I simply dropped the second card in my system and installed the bridge connector. This is a great video card, well ahead of its time when it was originally released, and even now only 10% slower than the fastest video card AMD makes. I picked up another 5870 on eBay for a mere $170. I have the same AMD Radeon HD 5870 that I've had since early 2010. The good news is that the market crash in BitCoin GPU mining (if you don't know what this is, don't ask… please) means there is a glut of recent video cards up for sale on eBay right now. You can technically add up to four video cards in this manner, but as with multiple CPUs your best bang for the buck is adding that second one the third, fourth, and beyond provide increasingly diminished returns. Certainly enough to make it worth your while. Yes, there is a bit of overhead, but it scales surprisingly well, producing not quite double the performance but often in the area of 1.8x or so. The little arrow there is a bridge attachment that you place on both cards so they can synchronize their work. Both ATI and NVIDIA have offered mature multi-GPU support for a few years now, and they've mostly settled on a simple Alternate Frame Rendering (AFR) strategy where each video card alternates between frames to share the graphics rendering work. So what's a poor performance addicted Battlefield superfan to do? Double down and add another video card for more performance, that's what. But unfortunately due to difficulties with the 40nm to 28nm process transition for ATI and NVIDIA, there aren't any new hotness video cards this year. ![]() This is normally the place where I'd trot out my standard advice urging you to buy one of the new hotness video cards released this holiday season. Like most games, Battlefield 3 is far more limited by video card performance than CPU performance. ![]() This also means it's going to be rough on current PCs at a minimum, you'll need a fast dual core CPU, and a modern video card with 512mb or more video memory. Since PC was the lead platform for Battlefield 3, it is the rare current game that isn't dumbed down to PS3 and Xbox 360 console levels it is a truly next-generation engine designed to scale over the next few years of PC performance. Glorious sandbox warfare on an enormous, next-generation destructible battlefield is a beautiful thing. As much as I was anticipating Battlefield 3, I have to say the open beta convinced me it is everything I always wanted, and more. I even wrote about the original Battlefield 2 demo on this very blog six years ago. ![]() I've been a fan of the series from the earliest days of Battlefield 1942, and I lost hundreds of hours to Battlefield 2 and Battlefield: Bad Company 2. But sometimes you gotta say to hell with rationality and embrace the overkill. It's also technically complex and a little expensive. Nobody really needs that much graphics performance. Almost nobody should do what I am about to describe – that is, install and use more than one video card.
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