HD Radeon 5850 Tri Fire ReviewATI Radeon HD 5850 Crossfire and Trifire Performance Analysis
Page 1 / 21 09/28/10
Introduction and Test Setup
Multi GPU scaling has always been one of my favorite analysis topics. Over the past year and a half I have written several performance reviews on both nvidia SLI and ATI Crossfire scaling. Among ATI cards, we have analysed 5970 quadfire and 5870 Crossfire and Trifire scaling. AMD has been working hard on their drivers to improve crossfire support and scaling with 5XXX series ATI cards. Todays article will look into dual and tri Crossfire scaling with Radeon 5870s younger brother - ATI Radeon 5850.
The following setup was utilized for the benchmarks:
I7 920 @ 4.30 GHZ
3 X 2 GB Patriot Viper 1620 MHZ 7-8-8-20
EVGA X58 Motherboard
3 X Gigabyte ATI Radeon 5850 (Catalyst 10.9)
2 X Palit GTX 460 2 GB ( Forceware 258.96)
150 GB 10,000 RPM Velociraptor
Dell 3008wfp 30" LCD
Antec 1200 Watt PSU
Windows 7 64 bit
Notice that I have also indluded GTX 460s as reference cards. Palit GTX 460 2 GB and Gigabyte Radeon 5850 are equally priced. At the time of this review they were both price at $260 at newegg. Even though the primary purpose of this article is to investigae Crossfire scaling, it won't hurt to throw in a good old nvidia / ATI comparison.
Software Used
I used a mix of DX9,DX 10 and DX 11 titles for this article :
3D Mark Vantage DX10
Unigine Heaven DX11
Alien vs Predaror DX11 Benchmark
Batman Arkham Asylum DX9
Battleforge DX11
Crysis Warhead DX10
Dirt 2 DX11
Far Cry 2 DX10
FEAR 2 Project Origin DX9
HAWX DX10.1
Just Cause 2 DX10
Lost Planet 2 DX11
Mafia 2 DX9
Metro 2033 DX11
Napolean: Total War DX9
Resident Evil 5 DX10 Benchmark
Stalker: COP DX11 Benchmark
Street Fighter Benchmark DX9
World in Conflict DX10
X3: Terran Conflict DX9 Benchmark
We will take a look at some benchmarks on the next page. Please note, that Palit GTX 460 and Gigabyte 5850 both come with minor factory overclocks on the core. For this article, I underclocked each card to the reference design clocks. This was done to keep things consistent, since once you factor in overclocking, the numbers could vary all across the board. We all know that GTX 460s are amazing overclockers and the 5850s are not too far behind either.
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