So I built my first computer a couple months ago. I did it on a budget of $300 and I bought an apu instead of the traditional processor/dedicated graphics. Now I want to buy a cheap $100ish graphics card. Here are my questions... please help:

1. What the fuck is crossfire?
2. How do I crossfire?
3. Can I crossfire an apu with a traditional gpu?
4. Can I crossfire thisapu with thisgpu?
5. How do I know which r7 250x is the best one?
6. Am I in the right forum, or is there some hardware section that missed?
7. (Bonus Points) What do you put on your hamburger and how do you like it cooked?

1. Crossfire is using two graphics cards as one. E.g. if you have 2 cards with 4gigs of vram each, then crossfire/sli them, the two cards act as one faster 4gig card (not 8gigs in total)

2. You put the two cards into your crossfire/sli supporting motherboard, connect to two with a crossfire/sli connection, and after that I'm not sure.

3. Not sure what you mean with a "traditional gpu." I do believe there are some GPUs that don't support crossfire. The important thing to remember, it's always best to crossfire/sli two of the same cards, rather than mix and matching them. There's already enough occasional problems with crossfire/sli support.

4. Not sure. You'll have to google around for what your processor supports.

5. Whenever you want to know comparisons, look up "benchmarks" for those cards. Benchmarks basically are values obtained through various tests that can then be used to compared hardware performance under various similar condition. anandtech is a good website to know. There are many other websites that perform benchmarks. Also, read discussions through other forums of user experiences.

6. Sure.

7. Cheese (preferably bleu), lettuce, lots of onions, jalapenos, and sometimes bacon.

Crossfire is another way to say SLI, I believe...

It's basically making two GPUs combine like some Power Rangers shit. NVIDIA cards must be identical GPUs, while AMD cards are Crossfire compatible with other cards in the same family and with different RAM configurations.

That's all I can give ya at the moment. I'm tired and it's late and I have work and I should go to bed.

Everything but tomato, pickles and ketchup. I used to get a burger medium rare but everyone is a coward nowadays and I have to get a well done burger wherever I go.

@viciousbearmauling: Well done is such an overused term. Well done is quite literally cooked to a char... I'd say the people I know cook burgers mostly medium, sometimes medium-well if they're not really knowing what they're doing. But I won't even eat a burger if it's truly well done... actually I did get a well done burger once in a restaurant by the cooks mistake and I had to ask for another because it was charred. Turned out he was a new hire and they were having the problem with his burgers throughout the whole day lol

Great, now I'm hungry. Also, don't buy a $100 dollar graphics card.

1. What the fuck is crossfire? As far as I know it's just what AMD calls SLI. The only thing I can guess is there is legal reasons they have to.
2. How do I crossfire? You basically just need a board that supports it and multiple GPUs that support it and you plug them into each other.
3. Can I crossfire an apu with a traditional gpu? I'm not really familiar with doing it like that, but if it's like SLI (and I have a hard time believing it's much different) it probably could cause problems. Much like RAM you don't want to mix and match when you combine the load between multiple pieces of hardware. They should be the same piece of hardware for maximum efficiency.
4. Can I crossfire thisapu with thisgpu? I don't know- I'm not even sure if it's relevant. I wouldn't recommend it, though. Goes back to your last question. APU is just a fancy way of saying onboard graphics card as far as I know. AMD likes to be fancy.
5. How do I know which r7 250x is the best one? You can look up comparisons of most hardware easily on google. I assume you mean by manufacturer and in that case (assuming you're buying online anyway) I would read up on what others have to say before purchasing. When it comes to hardware especially you get very good and astute remarks to most hardware. I usually just purchase from the manufacturers I trust because they've earned trust among a large group of people who seem like they know what they are doing. Either way you probably need to look around. An alright website for tech is Toms Hardware but there are others as well.
6. Am I in the right forum, or is there some hardware section that missed? I mean, as far as Giant Bomb goes asking a PC question on the PC forum is fine.
7. (Bonus Points) What do you put on your hamburger and how do you like it cooked? Medium or Medium Rare. Cheese, barbecue sauce, bacon, maybe some lettuce if I feel like it. Or some onion rings. I'll add different spices to it as well like Emeril's Original Essence and Lawry's seasoned salt. Despite Emeril's having a dumb name it's actually really good on most meat in general. I use both of those on a lot of stuff, though.

Edit: I should add you'd be better off saving some money and buying a better card then crossfiring a cheapo GPU. That's just my opinion, though. I don't see a need for SLI or overclocking unless you're making money playing video games or mining bit coins. There are many reasons for that.

Thanks guys. You've been helpful. I think I'm just gonna save my money. Maybe I'll go get some hardware books and just get my ass learned. Also, as someone who spends all day cooking "well done" burgers, I can say that you can make a pretty tender and juicy "well done" burger if you're cooking it right.

No. While in Corssfire you can use whatever GPUs from the same generation you want, in SLI you have to use two exactly identical GPUs.

I have spent the past few weeks in your shoes trying to educate myself on cpus and gpus. Apparently TitanZ is not nearly the monster I thought it would be for gaming just because it has 12 gigs of vram, 980 is way better for gaming since the titanz has horribly low clock speed, so I nearly wasted thousand of dollars on the titanZ, not that it's a bad card it's just not worth 12000 kr (2020 usd) compared to the way cheaper gtx 980.

Don't even get me started on how confused I have been over cpus. Cores, clockspeed, architecture, it's so confusing for a dummy like myself. So what I do is just compare bench marks and figure out the best by reading shit by people way more educated on the subject than myself. Best of luck! May you future rig kick ass.

No, this isn't correct. The GPUs have to be of the same model. So for example you can crossfire a 290x with a 290, but not a 290 with a 280x. Sometimes what you can crossfire isn't so clear with the product names as they often rebrand the names, so you have to go by their code names, So Hawaii (290[x]) goes with other Hawaii, but the 280x (Tahiti) will go with the 280,7970,7950 as they're all Tahiti.

@tothenines: Conceptually for gaming, the Titan Z is a terrible card. For example a 295x2 will wipe the floor with it whilst being less than half the price. Also as it is a dual gpu card it only has 6GB effective as all data is mirrored across each of the GPUs VRAM pool.

The Titan Z is primarily designed for compute and has features like fast double precision FP, which aren't found in consumer models. Also now it is architecturally a generation behind (kepler vs maxwell).

@slaps2: just one thing though, if you have a weak CPU (which is your case) having a high end card or even 2 lesser cards in crossfire or sli is a big waste, your weak CPU will be a huge bottleneck no mater what(unless you're playing a game with mantle support I guess).

If you want a dedicated graphics card I say go for a single card setup and get a cheap one, like the one you linked.

As for which brand is better I can't really say, haven't bought a ATI/AMD card for a very long time, I used to like Sapphire the best though, best thing you can do is look up reviews and benchmarks online to help you decide.

Also I like to put some nice hot peppers in my burgers, pickled habanero tastes great, and I like it well done.

This is what I meant. Depends on what you consider a generation.