Test System Setup

Processor(s): Intel Core i7 920 @ 3.8GHz (190MHz x 20)
Cooling: Noctua NH-U12P (Supplied by Noctua)
Motherboard(s): GIGABYTE EX58-UD5 (Supplied by GIGABYTE)
Memory: 3 X 2GB Kingston Hyper X PC3-16000 2000MHz DDR CL9 (Supplied by Kingston)
Hard Disk(s): Western Digital 300GB Velicorapter (Supplied by Western Digital)
Operating System: Windows 7
Drivers: 8.663.1 Beta4 Hemlock VistaWin7 Nov6

In this article today we'll be simply looking at the CrossFireX configuration against the single HD 5970 to see just what kind of performance gains the setup gives us. We haven't added in any other cards for the simple fact that we want to clearly see the performance gains of adding the second card into the mix.

Let's get started!

3DMark Vantage

Version and / or Patch Used: 1.0.1
Developer Homepage: http://www.futuremark.com
Product Homepage: http://www.futuremark.com/products/3dmarkvantage/
Buy It Here

3DMark Vantage is the new industry standard PC gaming performance benchmark from Futuremark, newly designed for Windows Vista and DirectX10. It includes two new graphics tests, two new CPU tests, several new feature tests, and support for the latest hardware.

3DMark Vantage is based on a completely new rendering engine, developed specifically to take full advantage of DirectX10, the new graphics API from Microsoft.

Straight away we see MASSIVE gains under Vantage. Looking at the Extreme test, we can see we've broken 20000 marks which is something we haven't done here before. You can only begin to imagine what people are going to achieve with the setup once they get into extreme cooling and insane overclocks.

The problem here is that Vantage has always made excellent use of SLI and CrossFireX. What we really need is significant performance increases in real world games.