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The "Other" Factors While gaming tests are the single most important factor when shopping for video cards, there are other factors that should be considered. The first of these we are going to talk about is power consumption. Putting down the cash for two high end video cards often means putting down for a new power supply as well. We already documented that the single X2 uses 564W under load, which is pretty beefy. How much does a second card contribute to the total load? Plenty. Using the same test methodology, the Quadfire setup now uses a whopping 769W under load. That means at least an 850W power supply, and I would consider that as the absolute minimum. Anyone running a Quadfire setup should seriously consider a quality 1kW PSU in their future as well. The next factor we are going to talk about is the drivers. While the state of ATi drivers has improved much since their inception, they still have a ways to go. Overclocking both cards in the drivers is relatively easy enough, however there is still no sign of manual fan control being supported. In fact, in order to control the fan speeds on both cards, you must manually edit an .xml file and then activate the profile in the CCC. Not exactly ideal. Switching between drivers is still a rough experience, as half the time the drivers fail to install with the dreaded "inf not found" error. On the plus side, once you do hack the profiles, the fans appear to cool the GPUs fairly well, even in the Quadfire configuration. 50% fan speed on both is quite reasonable noise wise, and does an adequate job of cooling. Conclusion So the question then becomes, is Quadfire worth it? My answer to this is, "definitely not". At least not at 1920x1200, that is for sure. The only instances that Quadfire made any noticeable difference was in the synthetic benchmarks; actual gaming for the most part was unaffected by the second card, and in some cases actually performed worse. Will cheaper 30" panels running 2560x1600 change that picture? What about new game engines? New drivers, perhaps? Maybe. However, as it stands now, I can safely say that Quadfire is a non-issue as of right now. We can only hope that AMD is busily working behind the scenes to improve the situation, and effectively battle the last stronghold of nVidia: the high-end multi-GPU market.
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