Crossfire vs. SLI full review

spoonboy

Distinguished
Oct 31, 2007
1,053
0
19,280
Full test, crossfire vs sli in a good selection of games. For the life of me though I do believe 'Prey' & 'F.E.A.R' should not be in there as the cards just brush them aside in this test. Especially 'Prey', if they wanna test opengl, why not use Quake Wars instead? Think theyve got the conclusion a bit mixed up, in that the paragraphs don't match the tables? never mind.
For 3870 owners, if you wanna play Crysis in crossfire, do it under dx9 not dx10.

http://www.legionhardware.com/document.php?id=716&p=0

 

cah027

Distinguished
Oct 8, 2007
456
0
18,780
Interesting. If 3 and 4 card MB's become the mainstream the extra $20 to $30 savings + better scaling in some games might push the 3780 a little closer to the 8800GT in terms of sales. But then again, you might be better off buying one 9800X2 card for the price of two of either of these or pretty close.

Does the 3780 support 4 card configs?
 

pauldh

Illustrious
yeah, DX9 looks like a must for xfire in Vista for Crysis. What a difference in the scaling between DX9 and DX10. ouch ... cat 8.2 maybe?

I wish they had Oblivion and Lost planet in there.
 

pauldh

Illustrious

Hmm, interesting. I went from one 320MB GTS to dual 8800GT and Obviously saw huge gains. Needless to say I am thrilled. Good to see you are also impressed. Going from GTX to SLI 8800GT, I'm curious if you ever see less performance in some of your games? I know Crysis you will be much better off now, but what other games do you play? How are you dealing with the noise difference? I am not knocking your decision at all, just curious as to what games you see a good increase in, what games are the same, and what games if any have worse performance?
 

ausch30

Distinguished
Feb 9, 2007
2,210
0
19,790



First of all I play at 1920x1200 and the games I have sitting on my desk right now are KOTOR 1 & 2, C&C 3, MoH Airborne, and Crysis (also Sims for my girlfriend). With the exception of Crysis none are very intensive but I have played the Demo's of other game such as Bioshock, CoD 4, Supreme Commander and Universe at War.

There isn't one game I've played that performs slower with the GT's than my GTX and the biggest reason I did it was because I couldn't see myself paying another $500+ for another GTX and I wanted to play around with SLI. I ended up with more performance for about $20 it cost me after selling the GTX.

As for the noise, when I'm playing games I have my Klipsch 5.1's to drown out any noise from my system and when not gaming they are rather quiet. I just use RivaTuner to crank up the fan speed before I start a game.
 

cynewulf

Distinguished
Mar 12, 2007
50
0
18,630
It made a good read but I do think it was a bit pointless of the reviewer stating that 'on average x card is faster by y%' because the averages are artifically lowered by a couple of games that have driver issues.

Also, looking at the benchmarks I get the feeling that ATi might just end up closing the gap a little more with Nvidia in future driver releases. Just a hunch though.
 

pauldh

Illustrious
Ausch30, thx for the info. Glad to hear only positives. Yeah, I partly just wanted to finally give SLI a try myself . Also, in the past two affordable cards made no sense in SLI and two high end was too expensive for me. With the 8800GT I finally took interest and got the SLI bug, beating an 8800U for less money. Playing crysis on the 8800GTS 320MB was another reason. ;)