Radeon HD 6850 & 6870 CrossfireX review - Introduction

With the release of the series 6800 graphics cards obviously also comes Multi-GPU support. For those of you who have read the reference review, ya'll very likely noticed the photo's with the one CrossfireX connector on top of the card.

CrossfireX, it's a multi-GPU state which we'll cover a bit more in-depth on the next pages, pretty much you can utilize two or more graphics cards to work together and, hopefully, nearly double up on the game rendering performance.

As stated above, the Radeon HD 6850 and 6870 only have one CrossfireX connector, this literally means that you can place only two cards into a multi-GPU setup. While you might feel merely two cards is a limitation, we think .. it's just fine. As always we do not recommend you to utilize more than two GPUs in a PC anyway as you'd quickly run into driver issues, increased power consumption, more heat in the PC to deal with and well .. it's just that the overall compatibility factor starts to increasingly get complicated once you opt 3 or 4-way CrossfireX multi-GPU setups.

Two is fine really ... so with that said let's grab a reference 6850 and 6870 card from AMD, and then hook them up with some retail cards from HIS, to see where we end up performance wise.

I can already tell you this though, this was the first time ever we had no issues with drivers, and yeah, in most cases the CrossfireX scaling was just extraordinary good.

Oh you're interested now eh ? Good, let's head onwards into the review then.

Upper photo here two R6870 cards installed in CrossfireX multi-GPU mode.