HD7970 Quadfire Eyefinity Review
Conclusion
Published: 9th January 2012 | Source: AMD | Price: £1600 |
Conclusion
Obviously when testing a set up this extreme the conclusion is pretty academic.
No-one in their right mind would run Quadfire. It takes too much power, we needed two Corsair AX1200 PSUs for this test. It produces too much heat. It's stupidly expensive, any board that supports Quad-GPU fun is automatically an enthusiast board with a price-tag to match. Even with our Core i7-3960X we were CPU limited in lower resolutions, as indicated by how close the 3D Mark X results are to the P-Score.
Finally, and most damningly, hardly any games take advantage of four cards. Sure some of this is drivers, and some of this is the games themselves. Both are equally guilty. Only two games took advantage of all four cards and one of them, The Witcher 2, doesn't support Eyefinity. Now call us crazy but spending £1600 on graphics cards just for Resident Evil 5 seems a bit pointless.
So for gaming the Quadfire is no use to man nor beast.
For benchmarking though. That's where this really does kick into gear. In both Unigine Heaven and 3D Mark the cards were a chainsaw through butter. Easily demolishing both our P-Score and X-Score records in both 3D Mark Vantage and 3D Mark 11. As well as giving us the highest score we've seen in Unigine, both with and without Anti-Aliasing.
So it's an extremely niche sector of the market that it's aiming for, but only a select few have the funds anyway. To treat it as a potential system is missing the point entirely. It's just a tool for benchmarks and high scores. It's as much a compensation for other areas as a Porsche wink wink.
Unlimited cosmic power, and for that alone it has to win our OC3D performance award. Now if only the developers and driver guys could get together and make the gaming results match the benchmarks...
Thanks to AMD for providing the HD7970s for our Quadfire review. Discuss in our forums.
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