ATI Radeon HD 4870 running in CrossFire with Phenom II X4 940 on ASRock AOD790GX/128M mainboard
 

Last few weeks, we presented benchmarks of the Phenom II X4 with 4850, 4850 CrossFire. Some asked why we used such a mid range card to test a high speed processor.

The reason we did that is because of a few reasons. Firstly, we do not have on hand 2 X 4870 at that time. Secondly, most readers would probably run a system with a mid range card as most are not gamers that goes for the highest frame rates. Thus pairing up a 4850 with a Phenom II X4 is probably one of the most probably combination that most readers will run their stuffs on.

Anyway, In this test, we go for the overclocked speed and with two high end ATi cards. The 3GHz processor is now overclocked to 3.8GHz and i paired up with a 2xATi Radeon HD 4870 graphics card. The system used 2x1GB Kingston DDR2-1066 memory running at CAS 5, 7-7-24, 2T. The BIOS used is the latest 1.25. The processor is overclocked to 3.8GHZ running at 19 X 200 (3.8GHz). default is 3.0GHz (15x200). Cat 8.12 is used.

First let's take a look at 3Dmark06 and later 3DMark Vantage scores.

3Dmark06 with single card

3Dmark06 with CrossFire enabled.

From the screen shot, we can see that performance shot up from 15667 to 20150 (in CF). That gives it a boost of 28%.

3DMark Vantage (Performance) HD 4870

3DMark Vantage (Performance) CrossFire HD 4870

In the 3DMark Vantage performance test, the boost is from P9293 to P12475 giving it a 34% boost in performance.

Next we test it in Extreme mode.

3DMark Vantage Extreme

3DMark Vantage Extreme in CrossFire mode

We can easily see that the single 4870 gave a score of X3897 while running it in CrossFire 4870 gave a score of X5854. A boost of 50% is registered.

It seems that at higher resolution, the 3Dmark Vantage is able to tap the extra boost, giving a 50% boost in performance.