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4-Way Crossfire with Radeon HD38xx Cards ... Looks impressive, but is it worth it? 

Introduction

After successfully mixing two different Radeon HD38xx cards in Crossfire mode, on both the AMD Spider platform and Intel based systems ... I wanted to take it one step further. I asked myself ... if Crossfire can be enabled using two different Radeon HD38xx cards ... will a 4-Way Crossfire with different Radeon HD38xx cards work too? I just had to find out ! According to our special source ... there are beta Catalyst driver floating on the web that will allow us to activate 4-way Crossfire without any complicated install procedures.

Thanks to one of forums members who kindly loaned us 2 of his Radeon HD3870 graphics cards ... we're now able to test this much talked about 4-Way Crossfire setup. We will be using a beta Catalyst driver v8.45a, which isn't officially supported yet and might not even support 4-way Crossfire ... but it's the closest we'll get right now.

Firstly, I downloaded ATi's beta Catalyst v8.45a drivers. You can download these drivers ... HERE (Vista 32-bit, 104Mb). We tested the 4-Way Crossfire using the following setup listed below, I installed two Powercolor HD3870 and two MSI RX3870. Two totally different paris of Radeon HD38xx cards from different manufacturers. I then linked the 4 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: 4-Way CrossfireX in action 

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