Gamers get quad GPUs

along with 40 lbs of dry ice to keep it cool , if shaving a 10th of a sec off here or there is a major advancement then we are all fools

Whoever wrote this forgot to mention that the cards also use 4X the amount of electrical power compared to the single 3870...

got to agree with you spfoo, Im a systems engineer and to be completely honest I got fed up with buying new bits just to be able to play a game, so bought an Xbox - works in HD, the games cost the same and on multiplayer its fairer as everyone is on the same hardware plus every game just works out of the box without having to upgrade and no long calls to tech support because it wont run on my combination of hardware. Games developers should capitalise on stuff that runs on lower to mid range systems, go back 10 years and there where good looking DX5 games, the problem is you need a high end system to compensate for sloppy coding.

a PS3 and you have all that for 10% of the price...

Its not 4 times the processing power or 4 times the performance. You need to copy everything to both video cards. Although are talking about 2GB of Video Ram combined, its really 1024MB with all contents copied to both.

Unfortunately, The games and the drivers handle just how much in a crossfire connection one can tap. Crossfire (and SLI) have never essentially doubled total system performance..

Something like this would be for games like Crysis on maximum settings to try their luck. Which brings me to my other point.

If you run a game that can take 1GB of System RAM at maximum settings, along with the allocation of 2048MB for video memory...

If you do the math that leaves you with 1024MB of memory for the system....Then you have the operating system and your other programs...

If you go Direct X 10. This means dealing with Vista with bad drivers that would lower performance over XP...and if your allocation of memory goes over the 4GB mark....

Thats when you may have to go to Windows Vista 64 bit version and get a large performance hit from the bad drivers..and vista bloatware itself.


This is Alienware if they've announced it now expect it sometime in the summer! What has happened to the m17x? Announced Nov still no sign?!

Sorry for the moan

all that processing power and for what?

"ah but its future proofing as well" so the marketing hype goes ...i cant imagine the cost of these things not to mention the running costs of having to purchase 1kW psu to run it all ..minesweeper has never looked so good

All it says "to deliver up to 4X the graphics processing power and 4X the mayhem", nowhere does it say 4X Performance, they covered themselves pretty well by saying "up to".

I don't see a problem with what's in the add.

CrossFireX to deliver "up to 4X" the performance

The question comes in to 4X the performance of what?

"As a dual core CPU can't achieve double performance as an equivalent single core, multi-GPU technologies can't do it either."

This is wrong, CF has achieved 2x performance for many different benchmarks. There are also plenty of CPU benchmarks that give 2x the performance, while these are designed multi-threaded programs, it exists non the less.

Technically speaking, the press release didn't *say* "4x performance", it said that crossfireX allows up to "4x the graphics processing power" which is true, you can have up to 4 cards on one motherboard processing graphics in synch. So it's not false advertising at all. Afraid your class-action lawsuit will have to wait until they fudge up their press releases a bit more ;)

What are you talking about Ashton? I just ordered two Extreme PC X2s for my E8400 based system. I'm getting 21,500 3Dmarks in 06'!!! These cards are amazing and I can finally run Crysis maxed out!!! You can even see the benchmarks which they listed there on the front page of www.extremepc.ca These cards ROCK!!! GO AMD! :P

Ashton, it will be a great thing and you seem to be an angry and negative young lady...;)

It doesn't say it will do 400% it says UP TO 4 x, Which means it has the abiltiy to do it. Not that it will and we know 270% is more likely. But I do believe in time we will see the drivers maturing to doing around 330% in some titles. Its the one thing people overlook the most is AMD has showed within 2 driver revisions they are serious about the support of this and I know not every title is going to show the best performance. But they are proving to us they are going to strive to get us the most out of each title and each driver revision is showing improvement. 

But to the original point they have covered themselves by saying UP TO 4x rather then saying you will get 4x.

Those card are mostly designed for games. Starting from APPLE II, I've been played generations of pc games. Sometimes, I still miss the classic games that brought me lots of fun before. I hated those realistic 3D games which requires expensive system to play and they looks fancy but boring. Shouldn't we focus more on game itself?

Well finally a box that could run Vista aero, maybe only at 5fps, but hey!

I think its safe to say they worded this correctly. It has "up-to" 4X the power.

It's that 'up to' part that is a technicality and is basically the disclaimer.

It doesn't specifically specify that you WILL get 4X power, just "up to" and they can hide behind that...

Also a note on the price. whats the point, you could buy a new car for that money.


Dude... I think you misread everything.. No where does it say it delivers "4X"... All it says is "up too".... meaning there's an end point. You have to remember that compaines come out with all these fancy "terms". It's all Marketing... So you need to be careful with your words... otherwise you'll be the one that's sued... for liable.

people always miss the upto part .... upto 20mb broadband ..... upto 10X faster blah blah... you see the multipliier and are expected to jump.

Unless they did a 3870 on the same hard ware and compared it to the quad....

drivers, cpu bottling , game , benchmarking software all factors here that put the 4X here in a grey zone....

Well, you got approximately 4 cards .. therefore 4x performance. 
It doesn't matter that you obtain it in 1% of the time, the important thing is that you obtain it.

From the tests I've seen I'd rather say you get somewhere between 2,8-3,2x on average, which I think is still good :)

Ashton,
I doubt they can be sued for false advertizing, even if they don't have a disclaimer. They explicitly state that it is "up to 4x" the performance. Sure that's misleading and unrealistic, but theoretically it is possible if performance scaled linearly. Inq readers like ourselves all know that in reality performance does not scale linearly or absolutely perfectly due to a multitude of reasons. The consumer doesn't know this. So yeah it's misleading but it isn't completely false either in theory. ISP's do the same thing all the time in their advertizing "up to 8Mbps" "up to 512Kbps", etc. In the US I think they changed the laws so ISP's could not do that. Here in Canada it's routine, but i can tell you that Rogers Cable advertizes the same way but actually sets modems to slightly higher speeds so customers routinely get closer to the advertized max, ex: a 256Kbps advertized speed is actually set to 280Kbps.

So basically, not much we can do about this unless governments or courts step in and rule against this practice. Unless they already have in some countries.

it is not exactly false advertising, as the hardware certainly does consist of 4x the processing power of a single 3870. The only problem is, said power doesn't translating into perfect scaling due to driver/software level inadequacies. 


The article does not 4x the performance, it says 4x the power, which is true, theres just no way of getting that power to perform.

^^^
Nvidia fanboy

I'm sorry if ATI is trying to make an affordable high end graphics solution. If anything else its nice to see some competition in this market so Nvidia dosen't corner it super cards which happen to cost more and unobtainable (a la 8800GT). Yes they have driver issues, but it beats spending more for an 8800Ultra. Now that they drivers are catching up, Nvidia can eat a ****.

You have to be kidding right? As ATI comes out with better hardware ,Nvidia keeps bringing out multi of multi video cards. I guess they are trying to confuse the buyers with so many choices that Nvidia has to be better right?
It is funny reading the post of Nvidia users over the last few months. And what is funny about the whole things is that when one company brings out a better card it is good news for all. This way the card makers are working hard to stay ahead and that means a win for all.

They said UP TO 4X the performance. They did NOT say you get 4X the performance. And yeah, its true...while on paper it sounds feasable, 4X the performance aint happening. Software engineers arent that good.

Overkill and at $5,000 US way too expensive. I just built a 3Gz Core2 on the X38 platform with DDR2 ram and a 8800GTS card for about $1,500US and smoothly run anything I throw at it in 1920 x 1200 including Call of Duty 4. I get a 5.7 rating in Vista with my Core2 chip being the slowest part, the rest of the rig gets 5.9. Over-clock the CPU a little and it frags the Vista rating. I have not tried Crysis though. But saving $3,500 I won,t mind turning Crysis or Farcry2 down a couple notches and really won't see any difference.

ah ah ah - not so fast. It says "4x the processing power' not 4x the performance.
4x processors working at the same time wont give you 400% performance difference -
But having 4 GPUs is 4x the processing power than 1 GPU....

You might be in court, but not for long.

the weasel phrase "up to", Ashton, essentially excusing them from actually attaining 4X performance. Actually, benchies over on [H] show no appreciable difference between 3870X2 versus 3870X2X2 in Crysis.

And the same people rejoycing are the same whiney bitches that were trying to glorify power consumption on AMD chips when they were getting stomped with performance.

Granted, this is great for competition, so I'm excited. But, the hypocrite level is at a new high.

;)

That is the funniest thing I've ever heard.

Well, if I want to be serious, I'll say that that is the biggest lie I've ever heard.

As a dual core CPU can't achieve double performance as an equivalent single core, multi-GPU technologies can't do it either.

You may argue that they get close, but in this case, two 3870 X2s doesn't get anywhere near the 400% mark, compared to a single 3870 (non-X2).

They can be sued for false advertising, unless they have a disclaimer at the bottom of the page.