ATI CrossFire Contest

With the recent GPU launches from ATI and NVIDIA that occurred earlier this month, I haven’t had time to build and properly test the CrossFire rig that we gave away during our AMD CrossFire contest at the end of August…Until now.

The rig is built around AMD’s 790FX platform, with AMD’s Phenom 9850 Black Edition at the heart of the system. Meanwhile graphics duties are handled by a pair of Radeon HD 4870 512MB cards running in CrossFire.

In this article we’re going to go over the components AMD uses inside the system followed by overclocking and benchmarks. We’ll start by discussing the Radeon 4870 graphics subsystem first.

Graphics: 2x ATI Radeon 4870 512MB

ATI shook up the graphics world with the debut of their RV770 graphics core. The chip contains 800 stream processors, the most of any ATI GPU to date, and supports DirectX 10.1, making it ready for upcoming games that support the technology. ATI has also addressed one of R600’s biggest limitations with RV770 -- its AA performance -- in fact we’ve found that ATI’s RV770 architecture provides better 8xAA scaling performance than NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 200 series. 8xAA is quite playable in many games at 1600x1200 and 1920x1200.

The Radeon 4870 is ATI’s high-end RV770 offering. The GPU is clocked at 750MHz and ships with 3.6GHz GDDR5 memory. With its 256-bit memory interface, this provides the 4870 with just over 115GB/sec of peak memory bandwidth, while the chip’s MADD rate is 1.2 TeraFLOPS.

Since ATI sent over two cards for CrossFire though, all these figures are doubled. That means the system boasts 2.4 TeraFLOPS of graphics processing power thanks to its 1600 shaders. And with dual 4870 cards running in CrossFire, you can max out all graphics settings in games and crank up the AA settings for max performance.

As we’ve told you many times over the years, the graphics subsystem is the most critical component inside your PC for gamers. If you’re gaming at high resolutions (1600x1200 or better), it’s the graphics card(s) that will play the biggest role in your overall gaming performance. Having a fast CPU and memory also helps, but at these resolutions the processor won’t affect your overall frame rate.

With our CrossFire rig sporting dual Radeon 4870s, it doesn’t get much better than this if you’re a gamer.