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It was just a few short weeks ago that I looked at the latest salvo in ATi's bloody war for market share, known as the 4870 X2. Not content to rest at that, I have decided to take this review to a whole new level and dedicate an entire review to HD 4870 X2 Crossfire X (herein known as Quadfire). While AMD really has done a number to nVidia in the mid-range and high end single card demographics, one market segment that has been left unmolested is the high-end multi-GPU segment. Could the HD 4870 X2 Crossfire X change this? This is what I hope to find out. Testing Methodology Since we have already covered the details about the HD 4870 X2's architecture, we are going to jump right into the testing. To test the value of Quadfire, we are going to compare its performance to that of a single HD 4870 X2, and we are going to be solely testing high quality settings in order to reduce the role of potential CPU bottlenecks. We will be using a mix of time demos, synthetic testing, and in game benchmarking in order to give us the best picture possible. To test the Quadfire, we are using the following rig:
As you can see, I have a beefy system to give the Quadfire as much oomph as possible. For the baseline, the Q6600 has been overclocked to a reasonable 3.54GHz, which ideally should ease any bottleneck. Just to make double-sure, we have also run some tests with the quad running at 3.98GHz as well. I have chosen the 8.54 Beta drivers, because at the time I started this review, these drivers seemed the most stable as well as best performing for the 4870 X2. So let's do a quick run down on our tests:
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