Single HD 4870 X2 vs Two HD 4870s on P45

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Introduction

Just the other day, I was talking about how the HD 4870 X2 is a great card for P45 users. When I tested HD 4870 in CrossFire a few months back on both the P45 and X48, we noticed that the x8 / x8 configuration present on the P45 actually gave us a bit of a hit in performance. You can see the full article here.

What’s great about the HD 4870 X2 is that we should get the HD 4870 CF performance that’s present on the X48, on the P45, thanks to the card using only a single slot which is getting full x16 bandwidth.

So, what we’re going to do today is chuck a pair of Sapphire HD 4870s into a P45 board and do a bunch of tests. We’re then going to pull those two cards out and stick in a single HD 4870 X2. We will run the same tests and proceed to compare. Since we’ve already looked at the cards themselves, we’re just going to get stuck straight into the benchmarking side of things. Let’s begin by taking a quick look at our testbed we’re using today, before getting stuck straight into the benchmarks.