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ASUS EAH5850 and 5850TOP in Crossfire |
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| Sat, August 21 2010 | 12:01PM | PermaLink |
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In our last CrossfireX article we performed a mix and match experiment, pairing up two RADEON 5870 from two different manufacturers and also with two different memory configurations to see whether they would play along nicely. The outcome was that in most of the applications tested, no problems occurred, however, in some of the synthetic benchmarks like FutureMark’s 3DMark Vantage, some of the test suites scored more like a single card. More importantly, we saw similar results in some of the games we tested. Needless to say that the potential root causes could have been anything from a system or CPU limitation to differences in the BIOS string and last not least the differences in memory space allocations that could wreak havoc on the performance. The bottom line, regardless, was that we didn’t recommend extreme mix and match because there may be some sleeping dogs that wake up just at the most inconvenient time or game play.
To look into the issues encountered more closely, we took a pair of uneven twins, that is ASUS RADEON EAH5850 and ASUS RADEON EAH 5850TOP, the first one following AMD’s reference design and the second one ASUS home-brew concoction of the 5850 series and teamed them up in CrossfireX. The default frequencies and the port configuration as well as the layout and cooling solutions of the two cards are about as different as one could build them within the same design constraints posed by the components but we did not really expect to find any major problems.
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