GIGABYTE Radeon HD 5870 Graphics Card in CrossFire X

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 OCZ Technology PC-12800 DDR-3 8-8-8-24 (OCZ3G1600LV6GK)
Hard Disk(s): Western Digital 300GB Velicorapter (Supplied by Western Digital)
Operating System: Windows Vista SP1 64-bit
Drivers: ATI Catalyst Cypress Driver, ForceWare 190.62,

As we mentioned already, we'll be testing the GIGABYTE HD 5870 in CrossFire X form today. What that means is we'll be placing our other two HD 5870s into our testbed along with the GIGABYTE to see what happens with performance when three cards are installed. If you jumped straight to this page you can jump back one to see the GPU-Z screenshot which shows us that three GPUs are enabled.

From a performance perspective we're not 100% sure what to expect. CrossFire X has never been the best of technology and usually completely kills any value for money aspect that the cards that are used tend to offer on their own. Hopefully the HD 5870 is an improvement, but there's only one way to find out for sure.

What we have missed in this line-up is the temperature tests. With three cards installed there was no wiggle room making it impossible for us to grab the temperature of the cores on the rear of the second and third card.

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.

In our first test we can see that in the P preset there is no difference with performance going back slightly. |In the X preset we've got a gain, but nothing too exciting unfortunately.