Date:
Wednesday, March 05, 2008
Author:
Brent Justice
Editor:
Kyle Bennett
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ATI Radeon HD 3870 X2 CrossFireX

The power of 4 GPUs is now possible with AMD’s ATI CrossFireX technology. We evaluate two Radeon HD 3870 X2 cards in CrossFireX on an Intel Core 2 Quad system, powering Crysis, COD 4, and UT3 seeing the gameplay experience produced compared to a Radeon HD 3870 X2 and a Radeon HD 3870.

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System Test Setup

We will be using a new quad-core CPU based platform with an Intel X48 ASUS P5E3 Premium, Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9650, and 4GB of Corsair CM3X1024-1800CD Dominator DDR3 to make sure the system will not be bottlenecking the GPUs.

We know system power was a concern with some of our readers lately in our Benchmarking the Benchmarks article. Going back and testing against our previous Core 2 Dual system at 2.93GHz we found no appreciable differences in gameplay or benchmark scoring in Crysis. So now this should certainly not an issue moving forward since we are in fact using a quad core processor at 3GHz with 4GB of RAM and a 64-bit operating system. The fact is though that current games are still very much GPU-limited at higher resolutions as you would expect.

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Video Card Comparison Setup

For all video cards Catalyst 8.451.2.1-080205a was used provided by AMD for this testing.

Please be aware we test our video cards a bit differently from what is the norm. We concentrate on examining the real-world gameplay that each video card provides. The Highest Playable section shows the best Image Quality delivered at a playable frame rate. To get a better understanding of what we do, please read this page.

In our tables and graphs in this evaluation the abbreviation “ADSS” Indicates the use of AMD’s Adaptive Supersampling quality setting for Transparency AA.