First please actually read my post, before asking questions.
most of the time, the answers are in the first post.
I have a 3870X2.
my friend mike has some 3870s in crossfire.
he loves his gaming, so for me to ask for 1 of his cards for a few hours, is a big deal.
so as you might guess, I didnt have too long for this experiment.
I just had to find out...
does hybrid crossfire really work?
heres the break down.
E8400 at 4.6 to 4.7 ghz.
4 gigs of DDR3.
my 3870X2, his 3870.
Vista + SP1.
Tested, 3dmark2001se, 2003 and 2006.
Crysis, Hellgate London, and Everquest 2.
first try, installing the card, required a full reinstall of the driver.
it wouldnt work without a reinstall of the driver.
just plain old wouldnt install the 3870.
the X2 was fine.
reinstalling the driver made it work fine.
upon rebooting, its strange, you still wont see the regular 3870, it will just enable a new option.
"Crossfire X".
you can verify 3 cards are there with GPUZ, or windows device manager. but not within the driver.
to make sure its working, I just did a few benchmarks.
first try, easily beating my X2's score by 3 thousand points.
yep, its definatly working .
a few tries at overclocking my cards, got me 860 on the cores (as this is what the regular 3870 tops out at, so I kept the X2 in that range too) 1070 on the X2's ram, and the regular 3870 at 1125 on the ram.
got me near 22500.
not bad for 2 tries.
3dmark2003 proved to be weird.
getting 766 FPS in GT2 in the first 5-10 tries, but never again, would pass 752. no idea what happend there.
93,000 was my top score with 2003.
2001se isnt even worth mentioning, as I forget, vista and 2001se dont like each other, and was a waste of my time.
Everquest 2 proved to be no different with 3 cards, then 2.
so nothing interesting to say there.
Hellgate London just blew up. I've never seen HGL more better in DX10 mode, then with 3 cards running in CFX, which was strange really.
great, but very unexpected.
Crysis was a disaster from start to finish.
GPU test was severly corrupted.
CPU test was really really slow, about 8 FPS.
remember, this is with a CPU at 4.65 ghz....
normally I average 24-32.
the game was completly unplayable with CFX.
plainly put, Crysis is a disaster for Multi Card set ups.
3 cards only made things 3x as worse.
Corruption of graphics, no playable frame rate.
horrible waste of time.
Overall, Hybrid Crossfire showed me one thing.
its fun.
when it works, its astounding.
when it fails, it fails completly.
you definatly need some major CPU power behind these cards though.
going from 4.6 to 4.8 ghz, yeilds some pretty big increases in scores, with no real need to OC the cards.
my set up is just too slow for them.
its not perfect.
but its definatly a viable option, for the benchmarker, and gamers alike.
but have no illusions here.
you need alot of CPU power to really show what the cards can do.
if your running 3 ghz, your wasting your time with these.
now I am curious to buy my own 3870 to try this out even further.
in all, I had about 3 hours to mess with this set up.
I dont have the card anymore, so no more hybrid crossfire for me.
think of this as more like a confirmation, yeah, it really works.
I am a gamer, I am a benchmarker, take it as you will.
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Originally Posted by zakelwe
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