Sneak peak, issue 92: Radeon 4870 CrossFire testing

We're in love with ATI's latest cards. Here's why...

So there are we are, messing about in the labs. Our next issue we're featuring a look at the two new competing graphics technologies from NVIDIA and ATI, and suffice to say we've got a lot of 4850s, 4870s, GTX260s and GTX280s floating around at the moment.

So, we get curious.

Curious about just how much power you can get out of the new ATI cards, especially in CrossFire. Even more specifically, we were wondering what kind of performance simply overclocking an older CPU can get you.

Our testbench for this little experiment was powered by a 65nm QX6850, running at a handy 4.0GHz. Anxious to get to testing and not bench-building, we eschewed water cooling or even the more extreme phase change rig.

We just went for a mess of fans to keep this thing on the rails.



Hell, there's three fans strapped to the CPU alone! Well, not strapped, more like carefully propped.



But hoo-boy, can the thing perform. Sure, you might suffer random bird-strike events as the fans suck nearby avian critters (or even untethered pieces of nearby kit) to their doom. In fact, with just two 4870s we scored an impressive 20,000-plus 3DMarks.



And we've not even looked at clocking the cards themselves.

So, for around $600 you get a stupidly good amount of performance on even older machines providing you give your tech a little bit of love. In a permanent setup you might want to move up to watercooling to be on the safe side, but it's still a fiendishly good outlay for more performance than God.

Our full round up, and verdict on who wins this latest round, can be found in issue 92 of Atomic, on sale 13th of August.