ATI Radeon 5770 Crossfire Review
After upgrading my Motherboard to one that had multiple PCI-E slots which you can read about here http://www.aaronrockey.com/intel-i7-950-upgrade/ I decided to buy another video card the same as I already had to give Crossfire a go.
The card in question is a XFX Radeon HD 5770 it’s not the latest and greatest but it was cheap ($187). I bought it from my favourite place auspcmarket
The existing HD 5770 I had was probably around 6-8 months old, I didn’t like my chances of finding another card the same but thankfully I did. I think these days you can mix and match cards to a certain degree but back when I last tried dual video cards with an Nvidia SLI setup (a long time ago)the cards had to be the same.
Below is a pic of the boxes, they are almost the same apart from some some different stickers and the older card supports PCI Bus Express 2 whilst the new one supports version 2.1
Radeon HD 5770 Boxes
And a pic of the cards
The Cards
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3DMark 06 and 11
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Furmark
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Passmark Performance Test
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Half Life 2 Lost Coast
3DMark06-SingleGPU
3DMark06-DualGPU
3DMark 11 Same as 3DMark 06 I used the settings available to me 1280×720
3DMark11-SingleGPU
And now Crossfire not a bad result, not quite double the score but a good result, I like returns on my investments
3DMark11-DualGPU
Passmark Performance Test – 1024×768
I did a search via this program for a baseline comparison on hardware similar to mine to see if my setup was comparable in speed to their setup.
Passmark-SingleGPU
And now crossfire, a weird result having been quicker than the baseline score in complex 3D graphics under crossfire the baseline and mine are closer even though the 3D graphics DX-10 is almost double. Strange…
Passmark-DualGPU
Maybe things will be better with Furmark
Furmark With Furmark I had the option to use a couple of resolutions, 1280×720 and 1920×1080
AKA program for improved room heating
Furmark 1280×720 Single GPU
Furmark-SingleGPU1280x720
And now crossfire, I was getting some crashes under crossfire with Furmark so upgraded the Catalyst driver which solved the crashes. The score has almost doubled again but notice the GPU temp, due to the original card having such a large covering over it the new card which is below is basically slowing the air flow and giving heat to the top original one, I will have to move these cards around to see if the temperatures improve. One thing for sure if it’s cold in your room run Furmark for a bit to warm it up! With winter coming in a few months I now have another heater.
Furmark-DualGPU1280x720
Furmark at a higher resolution. 1920×1080
Furmark-SingleGPU1920x1080
With crossfire, pretty much an expected outcome based on the lower resolution scores.
Furmark-DualGPU1920x1080
Half Life 2 Lost Coast 1680×1050
HL2LostCoast-SingleGPU
And with crossfire, not much of an improvement here at all. I did try running the test a few times to see if there was any improvements but alas no, but in the scheme of things a frame rate of 30 is playable this is more than playable and looked great at 1680×1050.
HL2LostCoast-DualGPU
This is a blurry pic of the cards together, you can see there isn’t much room for air flow for the top card.
Bugger all clearance
Final thoughts, well for $187 I think I got a bargain, in most cases the speed is almost double and I’ve been playing my games in much higher resolutions than I had before and its fun. The heat issue I’m going to have to look at, I have an Antec case which has speed adjustable fans at the front I have them on max which is rather loud and annoying.
I did try some overclocking but the differences weren’t that great so I didn’t bother reporting them here, I’m not one for overclocking my gear, my little 500W Antec power supply probably couldn’t cope anyway! 
One more thing, don’t play Dawn of War – Retribution on high settings online, I did and got into trouble because I slowed a game down too much!
Cheers
Aaron
