ATI Radeon HD 5870 CrossFireX Review --- TheThirdMedia Hardware

Test Setup

We'll be using two system configurations to evaluate the Radeon HD 5870 in CrossFire, one of which is our trusty Intel X38 setup, which has the following specifications:

Intel X38 Test System:

Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6850 (3.00GHz)
Gigabyte X38T-DQ6 motherboard
2 x 1GB DDR3-1333 Aeneon memory in dual channel mode
Seagate 7200.10 200GB SATA hard drive
Windows Vista Ultimate with SP1

To see if the Intel X38 still has what it takes, we've also benchmarked the cards on an Intel X58 system with the following specifications:

Intel X58 Test System:

Intel Core i7 975 (3.33GHz)
Gigabyte GA-EX58 Extreme motherboard
3 x 1GB Kingston HyperX DDR3-1333 in triple channel mode
Seagate 7200.10 200GB SATA hard drive
Windows Vista Ultimate with SP1

This is perhaps one of the best gaming setups money can buy now, two Radeon HD 5870 mated to a Core i7 975 processor.

Key comparisons here will obviously be between the CrossFire setups with the Radeon HD 5870 and the Radeon HD 4870 X2. We are also interested to see how the performance varied across the Intel X38 and X58 platforms. The X58 may have the brawn of Intel's current flagship Core i7 processor, the Core i7 975, but gaming performance is still heavily dependent on GPUs rather than CPUs. With that in mind, let's examine the variance in performance on the two platforms.

The full list of cards and driver versions used:

ATI Radeon HD 5870 1GB GDDR5 (ATI Driver 8.66 Beta)
ATI Radeon HD 5870 1GB GDDR5 in CrossFireX (ATI Driver 8.66 Beta)
ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 2GB GDDR5 (Catalyst 9.8)
ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 in CrossFireX 2GB GDDR5 (Catalyst 9.8)
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 295 1792MB GDDR3 (ForceWare 190.62)
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 285 1GB GDDR3 (ForceWare 190.62)

The cards were tested using the following benchmarks:

Futuremark 3DMark06
Futuremark 3DMark Vantage
Crysis Warhead
Far Cry 2
Warhammer: Dawn of War 2



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