Introduction

We've already provided a fair bit of coverage on the new FX-8150 CPU from AMD and it hasn't all been favorable for the team over at AMD. If you haven't looked yet, I highly recommend you check out our other pieces that cover the VGA testing side of things and my editorial Shi**y Marketing Killed the Bulldozer Star which has really gained traction over the last few days.

Today we test the video card side of things a bit more and see what goes on when we start to make use of CrossFireX on the 990FX platform. The 990FX chipset shows some good potential and it's going to be interesting to see what happens when we start to make use of all those PCIe lanes that are on offer.

The approach we've taken here today is pretty simple; we've got our two CPUs, the Intel i7 2600k and AMD FX-8150. We've thrown three Sapphire HD 6970 video cards in our Maximus IV Extreme-Z and Crosshair V Formula. Then we've benched them in our standard video card line-up with both CPUs running at what their maximum OC is.

We won't go into too much detail on that, though. Instead we'll cover the hardware side of things on the next page before we get into the benchmarking side of things.