Introduction

At the launch of the Bulldozer platform we grabbed three HD 6970s and put them into our Crosshair V Formula and then proceeded to compare the performance of our new Bulldozer platform against our established Sandy Bridge one. A bit like when we saw the gaming performance in our original Intel Core i7 3960X EE Review, we see that for the most part, gaming performance amongst the three platforms are quite similar.

When we threw three cards into the mix on our two platforms, though, we found that the Z68 performance was superior in many areas, including at the higher resolution which is where you tend to be more GPU limited than CPU limited.

Hearing the thoughts on the new Sandy Bridge-E platform from users has been quite interesting to be honest. A lot of people tend to think that the platform is quite over rated because of the fact that gaming performance hasn't really improved amongst the Sandy Bridge Platform.

The bottom line all along has been that you're not going to see any improvement in video card performance unless you're hitting a CPU limitation. With how intensive games are these days, hitting a CPU limitation becomes harder and harder - even more so when you start to throw ultra-high resolutions into the mix.

Today we'll be looking at the performance of our X79 platform with the three Sapphire HD 6970s on hand. Because there's not a lot more that needs to be said, we can really just get into the testbed side of things and cover that quickly before we get into the performance side then wrap everything up.

So with that all said and done, let's get into the test system setup and see just what exactly is going on here today with CrossFireX performance on the new X79 platform.