4870 & 4850 crossfire-x analysis
CrossfireX first appeared when AMD released its Spider platform back in late 2007 and allows for a maximum of 4 GPU's, but many have found that using 2 video cards (or GPU's i.e. 4870 X2) is the general sweetspot for gaming, both financially and performance wise. Although there are a slough of chipsets that are Crossfire compatible, I chose to go with Intel's mainstream P45 chipset as it supports two 8x PCI-E 2.0 lanes, which should give users a good idea how well Crossfire scales. The P45 chipset is also selling for less than $250, and although I could of used the most state of the art, high-end hardware, I wanted to see how these cards would perform on something that is a little more accessible, as not everyone can afford a $400 X48 motherboard. In this review I have chosen Diamond's HD4870 XOC Black Edition and a HIS HD4850, both sporting 512MB of memory (GDDR5 and GDDR3 respectively).
Test System & Setup >>>
