Running AMD Catalyst 8.2 with Intel Skulltrail on Asus' 3870X2

FOR MOST OF the past week, we're been trying to run Vista64 with twin Asus HD3870X2 on both Intel Skulltrail - the fastest 8-core desktop board around with dual 4GHz CPUs - and Asus Maximus Extreme, with 4.27GHz freeze-cooled quad-core Intel inside.

The "internal" driver that detected them fine in Crossfire at the setup stage crashed every time with "driver entered infinite loop" blue screen error: same nasty message on both boards. However, the internal driver did give us some nice 3Dmarks nevertheless.

Then, just last week, the Catalyst 8.2 driver series appeared - eager to test if QuadfFire works, we ran it - but no success with two cards: the driver just refuses to register the second one. However, it did improve the performance of a single HD3870X2 card on the Skulltrail, creating some very high 3DMark06 scores in the process.

We ran the old driver with dual default 3.2GHz CPUs, then the new Catalyst at the same CPU speed, and finally upped the CPU speed to dual 4GHz. We didn't overclock the Asus graphics card's memory - it can go to 2.1GHz easy usually. Take a look at the scores - all default settings:

3DMark06 old driver 3.2 GHz

3DMark06 new driver 3.2 GHz

3DMark06 new driver 4.0 GHz

Well... great numbers here, our single-card 3DMark record! 19556 3DMarks isn't that bad at all. And, as you can see, Catalyst 8.2 does improve over the 8.1. Now, if we applied the ~40 per cent 3DMark scaling benefit seen on other sites very early Phenom-based QuadFire tests under AMD's firm watch, and even ignore that the Crossfire usually scales better on new Intels than on AMD mobos, we'd stil get something like 27,300 3DMark06 score.

We assume AMD will do a bit more work on the driver scaling before this support becomes official in the Catalyst 8.3 series - we'll run the test (and other usual benchmarks) again then. A water-cooled, short-size dual HD3870X2 with 0.8ns or faster GDDR3 should give us even higher results then, helping keep Nvidia busy with some real competition, at least until the R700 series comes out. µ