armddd's Blog

Mixing ATI Radeon HD Graphics Cards in CrossFire

When it comes mixing and matching different types of graphics card and running them in either SLI or CrossFire mode, you are bound to have a number of problems. You will not find too many people advising in trying this, but the video card companies are working hard at making this work. Today, we are looking at ATI's budget friendly Radeon HD 3850 and Radeon HD 3870 graphics cards to seeing how they work together in CrossFire. We've previously reviewed both of these series in CrossFire before, but never dared to look at them mixed together and running CrossFire. ATI has done a ton of driver improvements since we first looked at those cards with the CATALYST 7.11 beta drivers, and the CATALYST 8.1 and CATALYST 8.2 drivers have proven to be very solid. While the ATI CATALYST 8.2 drivers will be out by the time this is posted, this article still will be useful as the only major performance enhancement in CATALYST 8.2 drivers is on Company of Heroes.

It doesn't look right, but you can connect the ATI Radeon HD 3850 and ATI Radeon HD 3870 together and enable CrossFire. ATI says you only need to use one interconnect, but since our cards came with two interconnects we used both. We have tried benchmarking with just one interconnect and then again with two and didn't notice any differences.

With Device Manager open in Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit we can see that after installing CATALYST 8.1 drivers that both video cards were showing up and the drivers are good to go.

Opening CATALYST Control Center (CCC), we can once again see both video cards in the drop down menu and that CrossFire has been automatically enabled. Setting up CrossFire on mixed and matched cards like these is just like regular CrossFire, so there isn't too much else to show or talk about.

The Test System

The test system was running Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit with all available Microsoft updates including the hotfixes required for enthusiast video cards to run correctly. ATI CATALYST 8.1 drivers were used on all the Radeon HD graphics cards. All results shown in the charts are averages of at least three runs from each game or application used.

The Video Cards:

• ATI Radeon HD X2 - 1GB (825MHz/1.800GHz GDDR3)
• ATI Radeon HD 3870 - 512MB (777MHz/1.126GHz GDDR4)
• Diamond Radeon HD 3850 - 512MB(669MHz/1.658GHz GDDR3)
• ATI Radeon HD 3850 - 256MB (669MHz/1.658GHz GDDR3)
• ATI Radeon HD 3650 - 256MB (722MHz/1.584GHz GDDR3)
• Sapphire Radeon HD 3450 - 256MB (600MHz/1.000GHz GDDR2)

All of the video cards were tested on the Intel X38 Express Test platform, which is loaded with the latest and greatest hardware. The Intel Core 2 Quad QX9650 'Yorkfield' processor was used for testing as it proved to be the best desktop processor when it comes to game performance. The test system was also loaded with 4GB of memory and water cooled to ensure throttling of the processor or memory wouldn't cause any issues.

Company of Heroes

Company of Heroes (CoH) is a real-time strategy (RTS) computer game developed by Relic Entertainment that was released on September 14, 2006. On May 29, 2007 Relic released a patch for Company of Heroes that supports DirectX 10 and we used the latest patch to test DirectX 10 game performance. Company of Heroes is set during World War II where the player follows a military unit, known as Able Company, as they fight their way through some of the greatest and bloodiest battles, including the D-Day landings at Normandy.

Benchmark Results: Company of Heroes again showed that mixing up graphics cards doesn't have a negative impact on gaming at all. A solid improvement was again noted and remember CATALYST 8.2 drivers will give better results as these numbers are with CATALYST 8.1 drivers.

Call of Duty 4

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare is a first-person shooter developed by Infinity Ward and published by Activision for Xbox 360 , Playstation 3 and PC. It is the fourth installment in the Call of Duty video game series. It was announced on April 25, 2007 and was released on November 6, 2007 in North America. The single player game can be completed in well under seven hours, but the graphics are awesome. Click the image below to see Call of Duty 4 at 1920x1200 resolution with 4x AA enabled on the ATI Radeon HD 3870 graphics card.

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare runs on a proprietary graphics engine, and has features such as true world-dynamic lighting, HDR lighting effects, dynamic shadows and depth-of-field. "Bullet Penetration" is calculated by the engine, taking into account things such as surface type and entity thickness. Certain objects, such as cars, and some buildings are destructible. This makes distinguishing cover from concealment important, as meager protection such as wooden fences, thin walls and such no longer provide sufficient protection. The bullet's speed and stopping power are decreased after penetrating an object, and this decrease is calculated realistically depending on the thickness and surface of the object penetrated. The game also makes use of a physics engine, which was not implemented in previous Call of Duty titles for the PC. Death Animations are a combination of pre-set animations and ragdoll physics. Some mistook the game's graphics to be DirectX 10 based, but it is stated that the graphics use DirectX 9.

Results: Call of Duty 4 is still one of the top 10 best selling games in America this month and it is pretty tough on the latest and greatest graphics cards. The Radeon HD 3870 + Radeon HD 3850 CrossFire mix does great in Call of Duty 4 and was only 11% slower than the Radeon HD 3870 X2.

3DMark 2006

3DMark 06 is the worldwide standard in advanced 3D game performance benchmarking and the latest version in the popular 3DMark series! 3DMark06 tests include all new HDR/SM3.0 graphics tests, advanced SM2.0 graphics tests, AI and physics driven single and multiple cores or processor CPU tests and a collection of comprehensive feature tests to reliably measure next generation gaming performance today.

Benchmark Results: Just like the in the previous gaming benchmarks, the Radeon HD 3870 + Radeon HD 3850 CrossFire setup does great in 3DMark06 and delivers a solid performance.

Final Thoughts and Conclusions

Having a mixed up CrossFire configuration performed better than expected and was able to near the performance level of other high end ATI CrossFire setups. This goes to show that ATI has made great improvements to their CATALYST drivers, as taking an ATI Radeon HD 3870 and running it in CrossFire mode with an ATI Radeon HD 3850 was found to be stable and offered great improvements over a single card of either model. How many people will actually try this has yet to be seen, but this is an easy way to cut costs and improve performance. A pair of Radeon HD 3870's in CrossFire mode out performed the mixed pair in every test, so when it comes to performance, mixing them up isn't going to win any speed titles.

If you already own a Radeon HD 3870 or Radeon HD 3850 and find a deal that you can't refuse on a new or used Radeon 3800 series card then it might be worth it to try something like this out. It works and performs very well considering what is being done. ATI has done a great job with the CATALYST drivers to be able to support mixing cards and brands of cards and running CrossFire. Now, if we could just get ATI to release the CrossFireX drivers, so we can do 3-way and 4-way CrossFireX with the Radeon 3800 series!

Legit Bottom Line: Mixing Radeon HD 3800 series cards can be done without losing stability and the performance gains are very nice.

HP launches dc7800 Ultra-Slim Business Desktop with SSD

Hewlett-Packard Wednesday introduced a business desktop with a slim form factor that packs a flash-based solid-state drive, giving the system faster boot times than PCs with hard drives. The HP Compaq dc7800 Ultra-Slim Business Desktop, dubbed by HP as its smallest enterprise desktop model, provides improved power efficiency and support for tools, including Intel's vPro, that makes it easier to manage PCs.

A 16GB SSD will be available with the system, although users can select hard drives with storage capacities of up to 160GB when buying the product. The system includes support for TPM (Trusted Platform Module) 1.2, a hardware-based authentication technology for system security. The Compaq dc7800 Ultra-Slim Business Desktop runs Intel's Core 2 Duo, Celeron D or Pentium processors, and supports Intel's vPro technology, a platform that helps service and manage PCs. It comes with Gigabit Ethernet and an integrated Intel graphics media accelerator. Users can select between the Windows Vista, Windows XP or FreeDos operating systems. Pricing for the desktop, which is available now, starts at $1,258 with the solid-state drive.

Diamond Multimedia Tweaks The Radeon HD 3850

Diamond Multimedia is a new name here at Legit Reviews, but they have been around for a long time.  Diamond has been trying to get the attention of gamers for some time now, but gamers are a tough group to get the attention of.  Diamond released ATI Radeon HD 3870 and Radeon HD 3850 graphics cards back in November when they originally came out, but they were based off the ATI reference design and were the same as everyone else's. Diamond went back to the drawing board and came up with an Radeon HD 3850 that would be unique to them and be directed at overclockers and enthusiasts.

What Diamond came up with was a Radeon HD 3850 512MB dual slot card!  They doubled the on-board GDDR3 memory from 256MB to 512MB, which should significantly help frame buffer performance in gaming, but that isn't all they did.  They also tossed the old single slot cooler and went with a larger and improved cooling system that lowered temperatures across the board.  To top it all off they designed their own PCB!  As you can see, Diamond went back to the drawing board and came up with a video card that should impress most of the ATI fans out there.  It is interesting to note though that Diamond left the clock speeds at default settings even though they call the card overclocked (actually they spelled that wrong also, and put overcloaked) on their website. The clock speeds are default with the core running 668MHz and the memory clock at 828MHz. Diamond should say that the card is overclockable and not overclocked!

When it comes to power supply requirements keep in mind that you will need a 450 Watt or greater power supply with 75 Watt 6-pin PCI Express power connector as that is the recommended requirements for a single card system. If you want to run CrossFire with two of these cards, then a 550 Watt power supply with two 6-pin connectors is needed. When CrossFireX drivers come out and four cards can be linked together a power supply larger than 550 Watts will be needed. The picture above shows the single 6-pin PCI Express power connector that is located at the edge of the board.

The custom cooling solution on the Diamond Radeon HD 3850 512MB Ruby Edition graphics card may not look pretty, but it is quiet and beefy.  With the four screws that hold the fan shroud and cover on removed you can get a better look at what they have done.  The DC brushless fan is made by Y.S. Tech and has the part number FS128015ML.

Taking a closer look at the heat sink, you can see just how big it is and why the card takes up two slots versus just one on the reference card.  None of the Samsung K4J52324QE-BJ1A GDDR3 memory IC's are directly attached to the heat sink, but the air from the Y.S. Tech fan does blow over them thanks to the heat sink design. The Samsung IC's have a density of 512M bit and are rated at 1.0ns (1000MHz), so they should be decent overclockers for those that want to tweak voltages.

Foxconn puts a new spin on the X38 chipset.

While Foxconn has been a large player in the OEM market for quite some time, they disappeared from the competition in the enthusiast ranks. It looks like Foxconn has decided to jump back into this market segment. Their latest offering the Foxconn X38A is what we will be taking a close look at today. Let’s take a quick look at the feature list below:

In all a well rounded feature set for an X38 based board. And ringing in around $240.00 makes it a very decent deal when compared against similar X38 boards. The X38 chipset brings PCIe-Gen2.0 to the table, which in theory doubles the available bandwidth. But, if you look closer, Foxconn an even more interesting trick out of its hat. The board supports both DDR2 and DDR3 ram modules. Boards that have tried to pull of this trick in the past generally have suffered performance loss in either configuration. It will be interesting to find out if any observable loss will be detected after running the board through its benchmark paces.

Foxconn included clear cmos, power, and reset switches directly on the board. This coupled in with the post code LED makes this board very tweaker friendly. Well let’s dig in and see how this board stacks up.