Crossfire vs SLI Performance Comparison Review

Testing:

Setup and Configuration:

The testing setup used in this comparison will be a Corei7 based system. Rather than run at the i7 965's stock 3.2Ghz, I will overclock it to almost 3.9GHz to try and eliminate a CPU bottleneck from being a concern. Each set of cards will be run with the latest drivers, ATI Cards using the Catalyst 9.3 driver - and the 9.4 version used only for the HD 4890 - as all of the ATI testing was completed before the HD 4890 was released. On the Nvidia side, the driver used is the latest 185 series driver, which fixes the Dead Space issue with the Gateway XHD 3000 monitor. Each respective control panel will be left at factory default settings, with the exception being that PhysX will be turned off in the 3DMark Vantage test, since the Orb will not publish any scores with PhysX enabled. PhysX will be enabled in the Nvidia Control panel and in games at all other times. There will be 3 separate classes in this testing. The dual GPU cards in a quad GPU setup, the same cards individually, and the single GPU cards in a multi-GPU setup.

Testing Setup

Testing Setup i7:

• Processor: Intel Core i7 965 134x29
• Motherboard: Asus P6T
• Memory: Mushkin 3x2GB DDR3 1600 MHz 9-8-8-20 1.65v
• Video Card: See Below
• Power Supply: Thermaltake 1200 Watt Toughpower
• Hard Drive: 1 x Seagate 1TB SATA
• Optical Drive: LG DVD-RW
• OS: Windows Vista x64 Ultimate Edition SP1

Comparison Video Cards:

• EVGA GTX 295 x2
• Sapphire HD 4870x2 x2
• Sapphire HD 4850x2 x2
• ASUS GTX 285
• Sapphire HD 4890 x2
• Sapphire HD 4870 1GB Toxic
• GTX 260
• Sapphire HD 4850 Toxic