Picked up a used Gigabyte HD 4850 with Zalman aftermarket cooler for $10. The Zalman cooler kept temps at just 53°C — massive difference from my previous HD 3850 that hit 106°C! Tested on a Core 2 Duo rig with GTA SA, CoD4, Crysis and more. Full video here: https://youtu.be/0ORqQPk7kjs
I had one of these in a build with a mobo that supported Crossfire x4 (ATI’s implementation of SLi at the time). Fast forward a few years later and I’m on a different build and so are all the guys in my lan group. One of them mentions throwing theirs up on Craigslist to make a little cash. I offer him $50 so I can mess with crossfire. Turns out there’s a few other 4850’s I can swoop up on the cheap and for the fun of a 4x crossfire mess.
Man… that didn’t do shit but generate needless heat and run everything worse than a single card. But I did manage to try a 4x GPU’s build and we had a good laugh running stuff like Crysis on it with an old Phenom 3 at the next lan.
Haha 4x Crossfire sounds like an absolute disaster — so much heat for worse performance! But that's the kind of experiment you do just to say you did it. Running Crysis on 4x HD 4850 with a Phenom is peak LAN party energy!
Oh yeah, man. Thankfully, I had no delusions about it being anything other than a shit show.
I certainly miss those days. Bring back, dedicated servers dammit!