Quad SLI vs Quad Crossfire Heavyweight Showdown GTX 590 & HD 6990 Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2011-05-08
·
1,064 words · ~5 min read
0:00
so the purpose of today's video is going to be to evaluate quad crossfire with
0:05
dual Radeon 6990s which you can see on my bench right now
0:09
against quad sli with dual dual jewel dual gtx
0:15
590 so those are
0:18
about to go on the bench so i'm going to be using a different test platform from
0:22
what i normally use this is a Gigabyte g1 sniper motherboard
0:28
and it is running with an Intel core i7 980 x at 4.26 gigahertz or something
0:35
like that so i'm well over 4 gigahertz i have 12 gigs of ddr3 1600 RAM i am using
0:43
a different power supply as well but i've got my regular testing hard drive
0:47
and then because my external drive broke i'm using a wd green drive for my steam
0:52
files so that is the test bench i will be using to determine which of these
0:56
configurations runs better you may have noticed already that it's a little on
1:01
the warm side oh no not warm side it's a little on the loud side the reason for
1:04
that is that you can see these rubber spacers that come on the 6990s
1:10
here yeah now you can see it that is to give it see you can see at
1:14
the bottom it's very close together at the top it's
1:17
slightly separated that gives it a little bit of a gap for that fan to
1:21
intake air but it still has to work pretty hard to cool those two gpus
1:26
so it is a little on the loud side here you
1:30
can see my lost planet two results i'm going to be comparing
1:33
the quad crossfire against the quad sli and then if i have time i will also run
1:38
individual 6990 and individual gtx 590
1:41
numbers to compare against their dual
1:45
graphics equivalents although it's not equivalent
1:48
at all so i've got most of my testing done i'm
1:53
just running the lost planet 2 bench on the gtx 590 quad sli configuration so of
1:59
note about this particular video is the fact that i will be using a higher
2:04
resolution than normal you can see my 1920x1080 monitor is actually back there
2:09
behind my 30 inch 2560x1600 monitor also because we are
2:14
using very high-end GPU configurations i will be using higher anti-aliasing in
2:18
isotropic filtering settings than i normally do so i'll be cranking up
2:22
as high as they go for all of the games in my testing suite which will be
2:26
battlefield bad company 2 crisis 2 metro 2033 and lost planet 2. so for the first
2:31
three games i'll be doing my own custom run-throughs recorded with fraps and for
2:35
lost planet 2 i'm using test b you can see here i have the gtx 590s on
2:40
the test bench they're not nearly as loud as the 6990s
2:44
although they do get toasty and they do get loud running in a configuration like
2:47
this especially that top card although you can see the spacing is significantly
2:51
more than we were seeing previously with
2:55
our other config you can actually see all the way through it and both cards
2:59
are able to sit straight in their slots
3:02
you may ask why i chose to use the slots
3:05
that are right next to each other on this board versus this one right here
3:09
and the reason as you can see in the PCIe slot there is that
3:13
this bottom slot is only wired for 8x so if i were to use these two high-end gpus
3:18
uh in the top and the bottom PCIe 16x slots on the g1 sniper i'd be running
3:23
them at 16x and 8x mode respectively and
3:26
based on my recent testing with PCIe bandwidth i felt that was not really
3:30
appropriate so i would have liked to use the two 16x slots which is what i've
3:34
decided to do here so i will be back with the results once i'm finished
3:37
running my single gtx 590 tests all right guys so i'm using the latest
3:42
drivers available at the time of filming and benchmarking which is all on the
3:47
same night tonight and uh here are the settings that i was
3:50
using so crisis 2 is obviously at maximum so the game that scaled the best
3:56
out of the ones in my test suite was obviously battlefield bad company too uh
4:00
the 6990s um actually scale more than a hundred
4:05
percent which makes no sense but uh we'll just consider that within the
4:09
margin of error and we'll call it 100 scaling and then for the 590s we saw
4:14
almost 100 scaling something like 90 scaling so excellent scaling on that
4:19
particular game 590 scaled very very well in crisis 2. 69.90 besides the
4:24
flickering bug which made the game pretty much unplayable
4:28
also didn't scale very well AMD has some work to do on the crisis 2 performance
4:33
of their 6990 but i'm sure that's something they'll resolve with a driver
4:36
issue in the future metro 2033
4:40
6990 scaled quite well uh adding another
4:43
50 performance to itself as well as the 590 590 actually scaled quite well as
4:48
well but still falls short of the quad crossfire setup in terms of overall
4:52
performance on lost planet 2 we see very
4:56
poor scaling across the board and the 590 sli beats a little crossfire
5:01
as well as on battlefield bad company 2
5:05
the 590 quad sli wins so basically the
5:08
objective today was not to determine a clear winner it was more to look at the
5:12
state of quad GPU gaming as a whole i'm not going to say
5:16
who but i well actually okay i got blue screens with both solutions during my
5:21
testing among other sort of random issues that
5:24
did crop up so i would go as far as to say that there's definitely some work to
5:28
do on the drivers for uh both of these cards and uh but once that's resolved
5:32
they definitely deliver some crazy performance numbers in the
5:37
right scenarios remember these are all benchmarked at 2560 by 1600 so we're
5:42
looking at battlefield bad company 2 numbers well over 100 FPS