Introduction

As our third retail HD 5870 rolled into the labs it was time to check out CrossFire X. Some may wonder what CrossFire X is. Well, it's like CrossFire, but with an X. On a serious note, though, in a single GPU setup it means we're going to be dealing with three cards today. If you're packing a dual GPU setup it tends to mean you're dealing with four GPUs which is something we intend to attack when the HD 5870 X2 shows up on our door step.

Today we've got the new single GPU beast from ATI which has left quite a mark, not just on us, but everyone who has had the privilege of touching the card and sliding it into their system.

Since we already know how a stock HD 5870 is going to perform, we thought it was the perfect time to take CrossFire X for a spin. Unlike our first CrossFire article, because we haven't had a look at what GIGABYTE are giving us we'll take the time to have a look at the package they're offering before getting into the card itself.

Once we've done that it's all going to be about one thing and that's the performance CrossFire X has to offer. Once we've gone through our benchmark line-up we'll wrap it all up with our final thoughts.