MSI 870A FUZION Lucid Hydralogix Multi GPU 3DMark Vantage Demo Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2011-05-08
·
631 words · ~3 min read
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as promised here is a video showcasing
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the Lucid logic Hydra engine and so that
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is the chip on this particular motherboard this is the MSI 870a fusion
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and you can see I have one 5870 and one GeForce GTX 480 you can't
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really see that but it says 480 there I assure you it does and I am running
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these in here we are we'll bring up the
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uh hydrologics engine control panel so
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I'm running them in an enable hydr Logics and I'm actually running them in X mode now I'm just going to show 3D
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Mark Vantage um but one I just want to
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talk briefly about the advantages and disadvantages of Hydra first of all the
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an advantage is that it allows you to run two NVIDIA cards together for a
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performance increase on an AMD chipset which is what we're doing here I
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actually ran those numbers as well it also allows you to run two ATI cards
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either in crossfire mode or in hydrolics
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mode and then you can ALS o run two
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mixed cards from completely different manufacturers for a performance boost so
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it gives you that flexibility another thing it allows you to do is take cards
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from completely different Generations like a 5800 and a 5700 and run those
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together for a performance increase very cool stuff now the disadvantage is that
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you do depend on the drivers from Lucid
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so that's where you're going to get support enabled for whatever games you
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want to run uh with this particular configuration so it's not going to work
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in everything and compatibility was a wee bit spotty according to my testing
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but uh here you are I'm going to launch Vantage and then I will show you it
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actually does run and you do get a tangible performance boost kind of cool
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here it is here is the evidence that it does actually work check this out we are
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in X mode dx10 you can you can disable this little badge here obviously well
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not obviously but you can you can do it and uh so it'll say a mode or n mode
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when you're in uh the various modes so
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here are the two cards and I'm not cheating see there's no other system
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here there's a lot of other parts probably systems worth of Parts but see
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you can clearly see that one's not plugged in and uh you can clearly see
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that these graphics cards are not plugged into motherboards neither is
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that one so not not that one
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either that hard drive clearly not plugged into a system so there's no
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Wizardry going on here it is actually working so I'll show you the score in a
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minute so there you have it if you ever
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wondered what would a GTX 480 plus a
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5870 score in 3D Mark Vantage there it
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is about 18,000 points so just for some context the scores that I got compared
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to this are about 14,000 3D marks for an
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individual 5870 14,000 about 14.5 about
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15,000 for a single 480 and then I also
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got a score running two 480s of about 19,000 so you can clearly see the 480 is
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a little bit more powerful than the 5870 and then when you add them together you
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get something that's a little bit less than 2480 so it's uh seems to work
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pretty well in Vantage although my conclusion about the technology as a
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whole is that the driver support isn't quite there yet but it looks very
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promising and very cool at this time