Quad Battle - Quad SLI vs Quad CrossfireX
Author: Luka Rakamaric
Date: 15 Apr 2008

Today we are going to give you an overview of the performance of two of today’s available 4 GPU configurations. Although the market penetration of such configurations will be extremely low due to the price, it is always interesting to see how far technology has progressed. Both NVIDIA and ATI offer solutions that have their differences, but are essentially the same thing.

So, let us first take a look at the older of the two cards available to make a QuadGPU system. ATI has produced the 3870X2 by putting together two RV670 GPUs onto a single PCB and attaching a big cooler to manage the heat. Such design is possible due to the 55 nm production process of the GPU, but has one drawback: the memory is clocked slower because the signal routing is not as efficient as on a two PCB configuration used by NVIDIA. You can read more on the 3870X2 in our review here.

The two card setup is achieved as with any normal ATI card, you plug the two together and connect the CrossFire bridge cable. We used an Intel X38 chipset based motherboard for this setup.  Although the one card works on any motherboard with a PCI-E slot because of the bridge chip, the two card configuration requires a CrossFire compatible motherboard, so you can’t go with NVIDIA chipsets.