HIS HD6950 IceQ Crossfire Review

Test Setup

The HIS Digital HD6950 IceQ is being tested on our usual bench setup of the 4GHz i7-950 and Gigabyte Assassin. As always we’re using the very latest drivers, which are the brand-spanking new Catalyst 11.11.

2x HIS Digital HD6950
Catalyst 11.11
Intel Core-i7 950 @ 4GHz
Gigabyte G1 Assassin
Corsair AX1200W
6GB Mushkin Redline
Noctua NH-D14
Windows 7 Ultimate x64

Crossfire Scaling

Although throughout our testing we’ll be looking at a single card and Crossfire, we thought we’d differentiate slightly by starting with the recently released Battlefield 3 and a game that absolutely flies, with Dirt 3.

Battlefield 3

With the more modern engine running behind Battlefield 3 it initially looks like the extra card only gives us a 50% increase, which it does, but we have to remember that this has its roots in consoles, and so it might just be a case of bad optimisation on the part of the developers, Digital Illusions. Yes the same Digital Illusions who brought us the epic Pinball games on the Amiga, for the older people in the audience.

 

Dirt3

Codemasters Dirt3 definitely runs smoothly on almost anything, but perhaps most impressively is how well it scales across multiple GPUs. Whilst not strictly 100% better it’s certainly near as dammit. 106FPS on one card, 198FPS on two.