The AMD CrossFireX platform is geared towards the gamer and if you have a decent Quad-Core Phenom and any 3000 or 4000 series cards there is no game that cannot be played. High Resolutions and advanced settings in the VGA panel will become more robust as you move into the top end cards like the 3870 X2 or any of the 4870 series cards, but at lower resolutions without all the AA/AF settings turned up any of these cards will play today’s current crop of games.
This system sported a single 3870 X2 card and a 9850 AMD Phenom with 4GB of DDR2 memory in a Windows Vista Home Premium environment. The configuration of this systems showed all 4GB of memory functioning. I have been playing on this system for 30 days now to really get a feeling as to how well the system performs in daily use. I installed Photoshop and Illustrator as well as a handful of the latest games and began to go through the motions of testing how well the PC did in real time applications.
Multitasking has become the new work ethic in today’s society and your PC needs to be able to keep up with all the various tasks that are running without bogging down to poor performance. In this round of tests I opened up my outlook, checked my mail, then proceeded to run Photoshop, Illustrator, Quickbooks and Group Mail simultaneously, which entitles sending mass email blasts in the background while in the foreground the other programs were all running various tasks like rendering or pic editing and resizing. These are the most commonly used applications and the ones most associated with a SOHO business so I felt that for the real world tests these would be the best representation for the general user. I was impressed that unlike many of the AMD based systems we have seen and built in the past this system can hold its own. The system ran fine in this environment for many hours at a time and only needed to be restarted occasionally to free up the buffered memory that gets eaten up by running multiple applications and starting and restarting of programs.
Gaming was excellent as well with this system and all titles we installed and played had no problems or errors. Stalker, Quake 3, BIOSHOCK, C&C Tiberium Wars, Crysis and COD4 were all ran at a resolution of 1920X1210 with all the features set to their maximum quality settings. It’s nice when your games can not only play well without losing framerates, but look good with all the lighting and Antialiasing features turned up. The only gaming issue I had was with, believe it or not, C&C , and was an issue that I have seen on almost every system I have played Tiberium Wars on. After building an army of tanks, planes and men, when the battles start the PC stated to seriously hiccup and you could physically see the screen begin to freeze up momentarily as the system gets overloaded with so much information to process when there are many, many combatants on the screen being rendered at one time. Beyond that this system was a pleasure to both work and play on. There are even newer VGA cards available from the ATI camp that can be installed on your custom build for even faster framerates at higher resolutions than the 3870X2.
