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Asus EAH3850 X3 Trinity, world’s first benchmarks of triple-GPU card
It’s a world-first graphics card, with 1.5GB of RAM and three Radeon HD 3850 GPUs, but does Asus’ engineering side-project actually work? We put the EAH3850 Trinity through its paces to see what three GPUs get you in today’s games
As with many new GPU water-cooling systems, such as the Asetek GeForce 9800 GTX cooler, Asus has worked on the principle that the GPUs are in need of more cooling than the memory, so the RAM on the three mini cards is cooled with conventional heatsinks. It’s worth noting that these got very hot when we were testing the card, but not to the
point where the Trinity was unstable. However, just to make sure we didn’t break this rare card, we positioned an extra fan in our test system to blow air over the memory heatsinks.
The setup
Surprisingly, setting up the Trinity didn’t require much work. We just filled and de-gassed the BigWater 760i and then attached it to the card's input and ouput connectors as you would with any normal GPU water-block. Then we slid the Trinity into a 16x PCI-E slot on our motherboard (it’ll work on any chipset) and plugged our screen in.
Thankfully, we’d been warned that the Trinity only outputs via one of its four DVI outputs, and that it wouldn’t like a D-SUB to DVI converter or a dual-link DVI cable, so we avoided those potential headaches.
However, having to use single-link DVI limited us to testing the card at 1,920 x 1,200 on a 24in TFT at most. With the Catalyst 8.3 driver (the first to enable three- and four-GPU CrossFireX) we were ready to start testing.
PERFORMANCE
The Trinity’s performance ended up being incredibly disappointing. In fact, in pretty in much every test, the card was out-performed by a single Radeon HD 3850 card. To be fair, the results aren’t directly comparable, as the single card’s results are taken from our graphics card labs, in which we used Catalyst 8.1 and a pre-Service Pack version of Vista. Comparatively, we used with Service Pack 1 and Catalyst 8.3 when testing the Trinity, but if anything this should have improved its performance rather than slashing the frame rates.
Click here for the complete benchmark scores.
These results could well have more to do with CrossFireX not working correctly as with Asus’ unique implementation of a triple-GPU graphics card.
After all, our initial tests of AMD’s dual-GPU Radeon HD 3870 X2 card showed similarly poor performance, with a single Radeon HD 3870 card out-performing the Radeon HD 3870 X2 in most of our Call of Duty 4 and Need for Speed: Pro Street tests. That said, the Radeon HD 3870 X2 did at least out-perform a single-GPU card in Crysis, and the Trinity couldn’t even manage that.
**UPDATE**
We wanted to run a test on the Trinity that would indicate whether the low gaming performance was due to the card's construction or poor drivers. We know that 3DMark06 responds well to CrossFired GPUs, so we used that. The score of 17,854 is far more than a single Radeon HD 3850 should score - in fact it's a pretty epic score for any graphics setup. This corroborates our thoughts that the low performance of the Trinity is more to do with poor ATI driver support for multi-GPU setups in games than any dificiency in the design of the card.
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Poor ATi support with Multi-GPU in games? Surprise surprise..
Comment by C7ouD at 3:11pm 14th April 2008
GOOD EXPERIMENT,but in reality if this goes on sale nobody can afford it except for people with fat wallets.i got a 8800gt and im glad that the price is lower and affordable with great performance.
Comment by SEYKYU at 10:20am 14th April 2008
GOOD EXPERIMENT,but in reality if this goes on sale nobody can afford it except for people with fat wallets.i got a 8800gt and im glad that the price is lower and affordable with great performance.
Comment by SEYKYU at 10:20am 14th April 2008
Is the main card generic? i.e. could you plug in any MXM mobile cards?? If so, plug in 3 of the fastest MXM cards you can find and try the benchmarks again! I suppose they would have to be ATI cards?
Comment by maniacOverclock at 6:47pm 11th April 2008
I believe the highline of the first first graphics card with 1.5 Gb of RAM , look at the nvidia quadro's you can get a verison with 2Gb of RAM XD
Comment by AaronPcz at 10:46am 11th April 2008
You would have to be a mug to use multi gpu graphics. Most present games will not take advantage of the potential power. Reason, coders write for the majority who don't have fat wallets. Hell it is only in the last 9 months to a year that some games have started taking advantage of multi-core processors.
Comment by alexmackie1 at 10:03am 11th April 2008
Another potentially good product, only to be let down by poor driver back up....AGAIN!!....What clown is running the show?!
Comment by marcus at 3:56pm 10th April 2008
What a horrid, pointless card. Thumbs up to Asus though for experimenting.
Comment by C7ouD at 2:38pm 9th April 2008
Wouldn't that be a decent, and cheaper, alternative to the 8800M; the HD3850 certainly isn't a slow card in the world of laptops and notebooks.
Comment by Assassin8or at 8:05am 9th April 2008
it's probably due to the custom-made mobile design of the boards more than driver versions. It is disappointing to see those results but Asus have at least tried something innovative and original with the form factor and idea itself. I don't know what they could do to make it perform better...maybe they do and are working on it who knows?
Comment by EdArch at 2:00am 9th April 2008
ATi to sue Asus for creating custom mobility radeon cards that support three cards on a desktop platform. ATi's legal representative stated that this project constituted a "vile misuse of the companies products in a way which they are not intended to be used". Asus responded by saying they are "just having a bit of fun and trying to push the boundaries of technology. The move has prompted backlash on their user forums shortly after which ATi said "oh all right then go ahead and o it. We just haven't had time or resources to test this kind of setup ourselves". The case continues...
Comment by EdArch at 1:47am 9th April 2008
It's a great shame it wasn't up to much especially in COD4 where Crossfire really shines. I'm getting over 80% scaling by using a 3870 and 3850 in COD4 and similar results in 3Dmark and Crysis runs well at 1680x1050 with many settings on high (AA causes issues). I can't see there is anything wrong with the driver/OS setup - I'm using exactly the same and on the same system with a dual boot XP/Vista32bit SP1, Vista with CCC 8.3 actually gets a higher 3Dmark score than XP with CCC 8.2 which is the fastest release for XP overall.
Comment by combatus at 9:40pm 8th April 2008
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