HIS HD3870 Crossfire Performance Preview


Unfortunately, getting Crossfire working with the drivers available to us was a time-consuming task considering their beta nature and Vista x64’s lack of cooperation. That being said, once I FINALLY got it to work with Windows Vista, we were rewarded with some phenomenal performance increases. Yet, some games such as World in Conflict had numerous graphical errors and overdraw issues which can probably be linked back to the drivers we were using.

Due to the pre-release nature of the drivers (both the 8.43 and 8.44 updates) I am treating this as a “preview” and it will not be counted towards the overall score this card receives. In addition, I did not have enough time to conduct many tests due to the review’s release date.

A note about Crossfire Overclocking in Windows Vista x64: After trying for quite awhile, I was not able to get Crossfire Overclocking to work with these cards. Hopefully, this will be fixed soon.


Performance Tests


3DMark 06



Prey



Well, the potential for some great scaling of two graphics cards in Crossfire is definitely there but with these Beta drivers, I find there are too many hoops to jump through to get it functioning properly in Vista x64. Stay tuned since if time permits, we will have another review of these cards in Crossfire once WHQL drivers are released. Hopefully, this will give you a little taste of what's to come.