I have a custom built older system with the ASUS A8R32-MVP Deluxe motherboard.The motherboard has the xpress 3200 chipset and 2 PCI-E 1.0 x16 ports.Does anyone know if the newer graphics cards are backward compatible with PCI-E 1.0 in crossfire mode? I plan to upgrade from the Sapphire Radeon x1950 XT 512mb currently installed to 2x Radeon HD 5450 1gb or better.

 Graphics Card
1x Sapphire Radeon x1950 XT 512mb
AMD Catalyst Driver Version, and Driver History
Latest Drivers

Operating System
Windows xp Pro 32-bit, Windows 7 Ultimate 32-bit, Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit

Motherboard or System Make & Model
ASUS A8R32-MVP Deluxe, Thermaltake Xaser III Case

Power Supply
Apevia 680W Crossfire ready

Display Device(s) and Connection(s) Used
Dell LCD

CPU Details
AMD Athlon 64 x2 4400+ Dual-Core at 2.2GHz

Motherboard BIOS Version
Letest BIOS

System Memory Type & Amount
DDR400 pc3200 2GB (upgrading to 4GB)

Additional Hardware
2x SATA 120GB 7200RPM Maxtor HDD, 1x Western digital ATA/IDE 160GB 7200RPM HDD, 1x Sound Blaster Audigy 2 Platinum with front bezel,1x  DVD/R-RW burner, Front 3.5" Fan temp card reader combo, 1x floppy drive, 1x Thermaltake Typhoon Fan, 1x LED fan, 5x silent case fans.

Edited: 11/29/2012 at 03:51 PM by Scooter_2478

Such an old system it is likely there will be hardware issues with newer cards. I would say you need to look at the HD 4000 series but those are legacy. I would suggest waiting until you can do a complete system update, which includes that POS Office Depot brand power supply time bomb.

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Crosshair IV Formula, Phenom II x4 965 w/ Corsair H60, 8 GiB OCZ Platinum DDR3 1600, XFX HD 7970 Ghz, 512GB Vertex 4, 256GB Vector, 240GB Agility 3, Creative X-Fi Titanium w/ Creative Gigaworks S750, SeaSonic X750, HP ZR2440w, Win 7 Ultimate x64

Yep, shouldn't be a problem, although you might not actually have two x16 slots.  Often times board makers cut costs by using 20 or so PCIe lanes between those two slots.  When both are filled, either one slot acts like an x16 and the other an x4, or they both step down to being x8 slots, or something like that.  It just depends on the board, and how many physical wires there are in the slots.  If they both act like an x8 slot, you probably wouldn't notice the difference.  If one acts like an x16 and one an x4... that sometimes causes a little weirdness.

The 5450 isn't an unreasonable upgrade for a system from that time period, so I wouldn't worry about the old+new weirdness so much... but I would take a closer look at that power supply.

Sometimes power supplies get rated as "crossfire ready" the same way games list system requirements.  The game runs, but as a slide-show instead of a playable game.  The difference being, when it's the power supply feeling that kind of pain it can bring down the whole system.

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Troll Hunter

The opinions expressed above do not represent those of Advanced Micro Devices or any of their affiliates.

Edited: 11/29/2012 at 05:21 PM by Mime

According to the specs the PCI-E runs at full x16 crossfire,at the time it was the best mobo ASUS had to offer for AMD socket 939 .The Power Supply has dual +12V rails but oddly +12V1 is 22A and +12V2 is 24A at max load and normal use its +12v1 16A and +12V2 18A.The system is heavilly modified and i plan to sell it with the upgraded graphics cards.

Thanks for all your help and info

On PSU's with multiple rails rail 1 is usually dedicated to the ATX 24 pin and P4/EPS8 and the rest split among the connectors. At 18A, that's 216w to play with, so with 2 cards you don't need to look at any that use an external power connector (which limits them to 75w)

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Crosshair IV Formula, Phenom II x4 965 w/ Corsair H60, 8 GiB OCZ Platinum DDR3 1600, XFX HD 7970 Ghz, 512GB Vertex 4, 256GB Vector, 240GB Agility 3, Creative X-Fi Titanium w/ Creative Gigaworks S750, SeaSonic X750, HP ZR2440w, Win 7 Ultimate x64