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so the purpose of today's video is going to be to evaluate quad crossfire with

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dual Radeon 6990s which you can see on my bench right now

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against quad sli with dual dual jewel dual gtx

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590 so those are

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about to go on the bench so i'm going to be using a different test platform from

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what i normally use this is a Gigabyte g1 sniper motherboard

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and it is running with an Intel core i7 980 x at 4.26 gigahertz or something

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like that so i'm well over 4 gigahertz i have 12 gigs of ddr3 1600 RAM i am using

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a different power supply as well but i've got my regular testing hard drive

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and then because my external drive broke i'm using a wd green drive for my steam

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files so that is the test bench i will be using to determine which of these

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configurations runs better you may have noticed already that it's a little on

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the warm side oh no not warm side it's a little on the loud side the reason for

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that is that you can see these rubber spacers that come on the 6990s

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here yeah now you can see it that is to give it see you can see at

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the bottom it's very close together at the top it's

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slightly separated that gives it a little bit of a gap for that fan to

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intake air but it still has to work pretty hard to cool those two gpus

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so it is a little on the loud side here you

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can see my lost planet two results i'm going to be comparing

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the quad crossfire against the quad sli and then if i have time i will also run

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individual 6990 and individual gtx 590

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numbers to compare against their dual

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graphics equivalents although it's not equivalent

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at all so i've got most of my testing done i'm

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just running the lost planet 2 bench on the gtx 590 quad sli configuration so of

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note about this particular video is the fact that i will be using a higher

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resolution than normal you can see my 1920x1080 monitor is actually back there

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behind my 30 inch 2560x1600 monitor also because we are

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using very high-end GPU configurations i will be using higher anti-aliasing in

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isotropic filtering settings than i normally do so i'll be cranking up

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as high as they go for all of the games in my testing suite which will be

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battlefield bad company 2 crisis 2 metro 2033 and lost planet 2. so for the first

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three games i'll be doing my own custom run-throughs recorded with fraps and for

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lost planet 2 i'm using test b you can see here i have the gtx 590s on

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the test bench they're not nearly as loud as the 6990s

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although they do get toasty and they do get loud running in a configuration like

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this especially that top card although you can see the spacing is significantly

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more than we were seeing previously with

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our other config you can actually see all the way through it and both cards

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are able to sit straight in their slots

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you may ask why i chose to use the slots

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that are right next to each other on this board versus this one right here

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and the reason as you can see in the PCIe slot there is that

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this bottom slot is only wired for 8x so if i were to use these two high-end gpus

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uh in the top and the bottom PCIe 16x slots on the g1 sniper i'd be running

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them at 16x and 8x mode respectively and

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based on my recent testing with PCIe bandwidth i felt that was not really

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appropriate so i would have liked to use the two 16x slots which is what i've

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decided to do here so i will be back with the results once i'm finished

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running my single gtx 590 tests all right guys so i'm using the latest

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drivers available at the time of filming and benchmarking which is all on the

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same night tonight and uh here are the settings that i was

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using so crisis 2 is obviously at maximum so the game that scaled the best

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out of the ones in my test suite was obviously battlefield bad company too uh

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the 6990s um actually scale more than a hundred

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percent which makes no sense but uh we'll just consider that within the

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margin of error and we'll call it 100 scaling and then for the 590s we saw

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almost 100 scaling something like 90 scaling so excellent scaling on that

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particular game 590 scaled very very well in crisis 2. 69.90 besides the

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flickering bug which made the game pretty much unplayable

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also didn't scale very well AMD has some work to do on the crisis 2 performance

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of their 6990 but i'm sure that's something they'll resolve with a driver

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issue in the future metro 2033

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6990 scaled quite well uh adding another

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50 performance to itself as well as the 590 590 actually scaled quite well as

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well but still falls short of the quad crossfire setup in terms of overall

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performance on lost planet 2 we see very

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poor scaling across the board and the 590 sli beats a little crossfire

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as well as on battlefield bad company 2

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the 590 quad sli wins so basically the

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objective today was not to determine a clear winner it was more to look at the

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state of quad GPU gaming as a whole i'm not going to say

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who but i well actually okay i got blue screens with both solutions during my

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testing among other sort of random issues that

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did crop up so i would go as far as to say that there's definitely some work to

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do on the drivers for uh both of these cards and uh but once that's resolved

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they definitely deliver some crazy performance numbers in the

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right scenarios remember these are all benchmarked at 2560 by 1600 so we're

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looking at battlefield bad company 2 numbers well over 100 FPS