CPU3D.com

This article shows how a Radeon HD3870 can be linked with a HD3850 in Crossfire mode giving you a massive performance gain.

Introduction

Where was an interesting article on Fudzilla's website, showing that a Radeon HD3870 can be linked together with a Radeon HD3850 via a Crossfire configuration. Using ATi's latest Catalyst v8.2 drivers, the author claimed to achieve results that almost match a dual HD3870, producing excellent scores for 3DMark 2005 and 2006. I was very intrigued. So I decided to investigate this claim, and to see whether this actually works.

According to our source at AMD ... the new Catalyst driver will allow us to activate Crossfire with an HD3870 and an HD3850 card without any complicated install procedures. It's worth noting that Nvidia doesn't have a comparable feature with its SLI mode.

Firstly, I downloaded ATi's latest Catalyst v8.2 drivers. You can download these drivers ... HERE (Vista 32-bit). We tested the unusual card mix using the following setup listed below, I installed two totally different graphic cards from different manufacturers ... a MSI RX3870 512Mb and an Asus EAH3850 TOP 256Mb. I then linked the 2 cards together using the provided Crossfire ribbon cables.

In our tests we used the motherboard's standard BIOS defaults. ALL settings were set to default (AUTO) for maximum compatibility. Memory clock was automatically set to DDR2-1066 with the memory timings at AUTO. We also used the latest video, audio and chipset drivers. Dual channel memory mode was enabled using the OCZ DDR2-1066 PC2-8500 2Gb kit.

Windows Vista with native DX10 was used as our operating system. In all the gaming benchmarks we used a resolution of 1600x1200 with high detail turned on (x4 AA and x16 AF).

Photos: Crossfire in action 

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