| AMD Radeon HD6850 & HD6950 CrossFire Performance |  |
| Reviews - Featured Reviews: Video Cards | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Written by Steven Iglesias-Hearst | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Sunday, 26 June 2011 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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AMD Radeon HD 6850/6950 CrossFire PerformanceTo run today's PC games at high resolutions with all the settings maxed out you need a high end video Card, or two mid/high end video cards in CrossFire/SLI. The best thing about CrossFire/SLI is that you don't need to buy both cards at once, meaning you can spread out the cost of a system build, or simply wait until prices drop before you make your second purchase. Dual video card scaling has come a long way since its conception, in the early days Crossfire performance wasn't always what it was made out to be. However, our setups show near 90% scaling in most of our tests, this is great news for us budget enthusiasts out there as not all of us can afford to fork out $600 up front for the highest end equipment. In this article Benchmark Reviews will provide you with our performance and cost analysis of a HD6850 CrossFire setup and a HD6950 CrossFire setup.
For this review we will be comparing single HD6850, HD6870 and HD6950 video cards to the CrossFire Pairs in a mixture of DX10 / DX11 synthetic benchmarks and current games to get a good idea of the benefit of running dual video cards. We will also look at other factors you need to consider when running a CrossFire setup such as temperatures and power consumption, so without further delay let's move on and get stuck in.
Full Disclosure: The product samples used in this article were provided by HIS and MSI.
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Comments
1- I do really wish (for your graphs), you'd use a background that was uniform, to make them easier to see.
2- Nice evaluation as always, but I wish you would have included at least 2 or 3 nVidia based cards, for a broader range of comparisons.
But like I said, very nicely done (as always), & much thanks to BenchMark Reviews!
2) This article was meant only to show benefits of CrossFire.... No need for NVIDIA results.
Thanks for the positive comments.
Also, can we expect a 6870 Crossfire review in the future by any chance? I'd love to see how two identical 6870 perform.
Any further spin off of this review will depend on its popularity, if there is enough interest then we will.
It looks like multi-GPU setups are out of the question for me unless I spend more on air conditioning. :P
As for the top card's temperatures, any mid-end P67/Z67 motherboard has 3 slots open for each card and that should leave enough room for heat to dissipate from the bottom card. Right???
Is it really worth the, added heat build up/extra power needed/price of 2 high end GPU's?
Take my advice & stick to one nice GPU, it's still going to play near enough everything.
Now, a Radeon 6970 might have equalled or beat the CrossFireX 6850s, but it costs about twice as much as one, which matters if you're building on a budget and starting with a single card.
First off, you are comparing one card to (double the price)two cards. Where as I was comparing one card with the same "value" as two cards.
Secondly, I see you don't mention the extra heat they give out & power draw they take, do you not consider this a added cost?
Re power and heat: honestly, no, I don't consider those costs worth worrying about. If your electrical budget is that tight, you've bigger problems than the power your video card draws. Of course, if you need to upgrade your power supply, that's another issue. But presumably if you're planning for CrossFireX in the future, your original power supply was chosen with this criteria in mind.
Would be interesting to see a survey done on people with sli/crossfire, to see if they will stick with it, come their next build, or go back to just using the one gpu.
My guess is a lot would return to the one gpu set-up, realising sli/crossfire just isn't worth the expense/trouble.
2 months ago I bought 2 Asus 6850 DirectCU and I can assure you that it was worth every euro cent I have spent (2 x 119euros)
Here GTX580 costs 420 euros and 6970 is 320 euros, so you can see the price difference against performance...
with good choice of motherboard, case and fans the heat can be reduced.
In my particular case I have CM690 fully populated with Scythe Slip Streams, my motherboard is Gigabyte P45-UD3P that has 3 slots between PCIe x16 connectors, so when CF is used you practically have one slot of air combined with side fan blowing inside that area :)
Overall I'm quite happy with this build (although the CPU/motherboard/RAM combination is bit old, despite 4+ GHz overclock).
Next time when I upgrade (probably Ivy Bridge based) I'll retain the GPU setup. Of course until there is a game on the market that will choke it :) But until than, I intend to enjoy it as long as I can :)
Please realise, no matter which "good choice of motherboard/Case/fans" you eventually decide to go with. You can't get away from the fact, one gpu will run cooler & cheaper then two in that same system.
And remember, both amd/nvidia are trying to show sli/crossfire in a good light, their bound to, it sells them twice as much of their product.
But the thing is that one GPU will for sure run cooler but I don't agree that always be a cheaper variant. Did you saw the prices I mentioned?
As of temperatures in case of 1 or 2 GPU - yes, 2 GPU will run hotter but as I said, with good setup the temperature can still be in the safe zone...
But does it really work out cheaper after you have added the more expensive PSU you will need, plus the added running cost over the years, not to mention driver/heat related issues?
And I have to admit, with latest drivers AMD has done a very good job with their CF scaling and driver support. Actually that was one of the main triggers for me to jump into CF wagon (I was happy user of GTX280 before this setup). The other was that I was locked to CF since I have older motherboard.
lets not get into an argument, lets just agree to disagree.
My overall point is only to enlighten people to the fact, that there is more to running sli/crossfire then "just" the cost of the extra card, & in "my opinion" it's not worth it.
as to Pigbristle and to Steven :) I think we are all correct from our standing points :)
so here is my closing thought on this subject:
I had the possibility to easily upgrade (performance wise) from single GPU to CF for very little cost and I did it. Simple as that.
As Luay subjected it: "Poor Man's Hig-end Rig" :) I think that is in essence what I'm saying...
P.S.
I guess that I'm looking into this matter more like PC enthusiast/hobbyist...
That would be the reason to consider high-end GPU or even multi-GPU, to have overclocked my CPU, to buy a good & powerful PSU (that will allow some breathing room), to buy VelociRaptor as main HDD, to constantly follow web sites like this one for reviews and sharing thoughts and advises... ;)
Otherwise I just go the nearby computer shop and just by the PC that suits my budget and call it a day... :)
I used my diagnosis as my nick name :-P
hehe :) If I cannot joke with my self, than with whom I can?! :)
I know about OEM PCs... that is why I always build my PCs (at least the last 3)...
Another thing do you think an MSI 6870 Hawk is just as good as the IceQ 6870? Going to get a single 6850/6870 since I am on a budget then get another by next year.
I'm not sure what you mean about pairing 6870 with 6850. So far as I know, CrossFire won't work this way. Please explain what you mean.
The MSI 6870 Hawk will give you the same framerates as the IceQ 6870 if they both have the same clock speeds, there differences will be A)Noise level B)Cooling capability C)Power design D)Overclock capability. Since I don't have the MSI 6870 Hawk I can't really answer your question truthfully.
#benchmarkreviews.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=718&Itemid=72
It is also about 15-20 dollars cheaper right now. Clock speed is about 45mgz less.
It's awesome that I can SLI together a 5850 and a 5950 and the 5950 works at 90% and the 5850 works at 90% which is something like 160% of the power of the 5950.
Sure, I could just buy a top end card every time, but I would end up spending (2x)-x where x is the number of upgrades of the money.
Example. 10 upgrades.
9 * 600 = 5,4000
10 * 250 = 2,000
I took 1 off of the 600 dollar card because I figure you only need 9 cards to equal 10 of the cheaper cards performance (if used in pairs)
I never buy cheap motherboards anyway, even if they are single PCI-E 16x slot they will be over 100$.
I also never buy a cheap PSU. Even w/o using SLI my PSU is a high profile brand of 600 watts because PSU failures are very very costly and if you're on a budget then that can cause problems.