Clash of the Titans
ATI Radeon HD 5870 Single, Crossfire and TriFire VS GTX 285 Single, Dual and Tri Sli
Page 2 / 19 By: Wassee Syed -- 10/23/09
Test Setup
We use the following system for this article:
I7 920 @ 4.2 GHZ (203 X 21) HT enabled
EVGA X58 X3 SLI
Patriot Viper 2 X 2 GB DDR3 RAM @ 1620 9-9-9-24
Cooler Master 850 Watt PSU br/> 3 X Diamond Radeon 5870 (Catalyst 8.66)
3 X EVGA GTX 285 (Forceware 191.07)
Vista X64
If you notice, the DDR3 RAM is running dual channel. Ideally you would want to have triple channel RAM but 2 X 2 GB is what was available to me at the time of the review. I am planning on upgrading our benchmarking rig with 3 X 2 GB high quality RAM pretty soon. Our next review will definitely feature that. Now....some of you might be in shock and awe, wondering how a lowly 850 Watt PSU can power such a beefy setup. Well, I assure you, that this is one of the most solid PSUs I have ever come across. It is rated 850 W continuous and 1000 Watt Peak with 6 12 V rails. Two of the rails have 28 Amps each on them while the rest have 18 Amps. Click here for the manufacturer's link.
Benchmarks Used
I have chosen to skip some of the modern titles in favor of older ones, simply because I was looking to test games that are the most capable of stressing the GPUs. Modern GPUs laugh at games such as Left 4 Dead, Dead Space, Resident Evil 5, F.E.A.R 2, Fall Out 3 and achieve ridiculous frame rates even in single card configurations at 2560 X 1600 and 8XAA enabled. My goal was to test titles which can pose some sort of a challenge to at least the single card setup if not multi GPUs.
Crysis Warhead
Far Cry 2
Tom Clancy's HAWX Demo
Lost Planet Demo
Stalker: Clear Sky Benchmark
World in Conflict Demo
Necrovision Demo
3D Mark Vantage
The above list is not exhaustive by any means, but I believe it is a pretty reasonable mix of DX10 titles. I have also chosen not to use any gaming benchmarks that incorporate PhysX, simply because ATI cards do not support it. PhysX is an nvidia only thing and PhysX games both look and run better on nvidia cards. I could have turned PhysX off on say, Batman: Arkham Asylum and compared apples to apples, but who would own an nvidia card and run their games without PhysX? Seems pointless to me. This is why I eliminated Cryostasis, and PT Boats.
Testing Methodology
The only game I manually benchmarked using FRAPS was Necrovision. Other than that all titles had some sort of a built in demo. For this article I have chosen not to report minimum Frame rates. This is because, (A) not all built in benchmarks report minimum FPS. (B) The one's that do are inaccurate and cannot be used to reasonably judge gameplay performance. For example Crysis Warhead would report single digit minimum frame rates, which occur at the very start of the benchmark for a split second.
Related Reading : 5870 DX 11 performance and AA scaling
| PREV | NEXT |
|---|