HardOCP 6990+6970 CF vs 580 Tri Sli

[Timorous]

http://www.hardocp.com/article/2011/04/28/nvidia_geforce_3way_sli_radeon_trifire_review

The Bottom Line

AMD Radeon Tri-Fire is giving you the same or better performance than GTX 580 3-Way SLI for $500 and 200 watts less. You get both a money savings and a power savings using Radeon 6990/6970 Tri-Fire instead of GeForce GTX 580 3-Way SLI.

It just makes no sense to build a GTX 580 3-Way SLI currently.

I guess that answers the question in the other thread as to weather 3x570's would be a worthwhile comparison to the 6990 + 6970 tri fire solution.

 

[Grooveriding]

Good review. This data has been available for a while though. There are some reviews of 6970 trifire vs 580 tri. Will dig them up, they show the same results.

 

[formulav8]

I can't believe the power consumption, over 1000 watts for Tri sli. Thats nutty.

So the conclusion I guess is that ATI has definitely overthrown nvidia in scaling and performance when it comes to the ultimate setup...

 

[happy medium]

Looks like Nvidia needs some work with its 3 card drivers. Mabe they are not too concerned about losing .005% of this niche market at the moment.

It is good to see AMD has a leg up in this area though.:thumbsup:

 

[GaiaHunter]

I have a complaint about these [H] reviews though - they fail to indicate temperatures for the system, especially how other components like motherboard and CPU are affected by it.

 

[Skurge]

I have a complaint about these [H] reviews though - they fail to indicate temperatures for the system, especially how other components like motherboard and CPU are affected by it.

email them. I wouldn't go to the forum and try to tell Kyle how to do his job. He might go ballistic and insta-ban you.

 

[Grooveriding]

I have a complaint about these [H] reviews though - they fail to indicate temperatures for the system, especially how other components like motherboard and CPU are affected by it.

Just assume everything is nice and toasty :thumbsup:

 

[tincart]

email them. I wouldn't go to the forum and try to tell Kyle how to do his job. He might go ballistic and insta-ban you.

E-mail Brent with a polite question and you will get a polite response.

 

[exar333]

I have a complaint about these [H] reviews though - they fail to indicate temperatures for the system, especially how other components like motherboard and CPU are affected by it.

Answer: Both system are toasty.

 

[jackstar7]

I have a complaint about these [H] reviews though - they fail to indicate temperatures for the system, especially how other components like motherboard and CPU are affected by it.

But wouldn't this be largely dependent on your case/cooling solutions? If they just threw these on a test bench they likely won't have answers.

 

[alcoholbob]

Most of my experience at [H] has been snarky mods trolling you for a ban. Actually there's one mod whose a self-proclaimed engineer that deletes my account every time he sees it because he lost a polite science argument. Although it seems the other mods keep validating my new accounts fully knowing my IP because they know he's full of sh-t and has no grounds for banning me.

 

[96Firebird]

email them. I wouldn't go to the forum and try to tell Kyle how to do his job. He WILL go ballistic and insta-ban you.

FTFY.

 

[Zap]

Tri-fire faster than Tri-SLI isn't the whole story. They tested using triple monitors at an insanely high resolution. I'm wondering if that had anything to do with the performance results for two reasons:

1) On the NVIDIA side, each card gets one monitor while on the AMD side the primary card gets all three monitors. Perhaps Tri-SLI doesn't scale well in this exact circumstance. After all, supporting more than two monitors for NVIDIA cards is essentially a driver hack. How about a single monitor, maybe a nice 30" running 2560x1600 resolution? Besides, out of the five games tested, only one of those was able to run with average framerates above 60FPS (BFBC2 @65.0FPS) with the faster Tri-fire setup. Two of the five games averaged in the 30FPS range with Tri-fire.

2) The insane 5760x1200 resolution may have been too much for the lower amount of texture RAM in the GTX 580 to handle. How about a re-test using 3GB cards?

 

[formulav8]

The reviewers said they purposely used settings that would NOT hit ram limitations since the 580 has a lesser amount. So no real differences would be seen increasing the 580's ram. And the 3GB version would make the 580's overall picture even worse. Those things are so overpriced its nutty. NVidia has just clearly been outclassed this round.

 

[Pantalaimon]

2) The insane 5760x1200 resolution may have been too much for the lower amount of texture RAM in the GTX 580 to handle. How about a re-test using 3GB cards?

Which would raise the price of tri GTX580 SLI even higher. So basically even if it improves tri SLI performance the conclusion would be that you need ~1800 USD to reach either parity or exceed tri-fire in multi monitor gaming. Not exactly an attractive proposition.

 

[Dudler]

Tri-fire faster than Tri-SLI isn't the whole story. They tested using triple monitors at an insanely high resolution. I'm wondering if that had anything to do with the performance results for two reasons:

1) On the NVIDIA side, each card gets one monitor while on the AMD side the primary card gets all three monitors. Perhaps Tri-SLI doesn't scale well in this exact circumstance. After all, supporting more than two monitors for NVIDIA cards is essentially a driver hack. How about a single monitor, maybe a nice 30" running 2560x1600 resolution? Besides, out of the five games tested, only one of those was able to run with average framerates above 60FPS (BFBC2 @65.0FPS) with the faster Tri-fire setup. Two of the five games averaged in the 30FPS range with Tri-fire.

2) The insane 5760x1200 resolution may have been too much for the lower amount of texture RAM in the GTX 580 to handle. How about a re-test using 3GB cards?

Are you saying they should test $1500 worth of gear for a measly 25x16 resolution? What's the point? If you spend that much on so much and game on 25x16, no matter what any Amd solution will be better.

On point 2, try to read the review before you try to defend nVidia:

Please note that the resolution and AA settings used were not a bottleneck to any setup here. We made sure we were not running into VRAM capacity limitations at these settings, so performance is being correctly compared and we are not hitting any VRAM walls at these tested settings.

We have given every advantage to the GeForce GTX 580 3-Way SLI configuration in this evaluation, and yet it still can't compete. We are testing with the "slowest" Radeon 6990/6970 Tri-Fire configuration possible in this $1000 price range, and GTX 580 3-Way SLI just can't touch it.

$1500 worth of nVidia is less worth than $1000 of Amd.

 

[Skurge]

I cant wait to see Anandtech's multi-monitor review of multi-card setups. Not that I don't trust [H]. Anandtech just seem more through in their testing and test more games. Should tell use how the $1500 Tri-SLI setup does against the $1000 Tri-Fire setup.

 

[krumme]

Anyone knows how much of this story can be contributed to the new 11.4 drivers?

 

[GaiaHunter]

Anyone knows how much of this story can be contributed to the new 11.4 drivers?

From the article.

The exact same driver versions are being used, which is the latest Catalyst 11.4 Preview driver and CAP. We are using ForceWare 270.51 Beta for the NVIDIA video cards. We that ForceWare 270.61 WHQL was recently released, and we installed this driver and found no performance differences compared to 270.51 Beta. There are no differences that affect us between the two driver versions, so we stuck to the same driver used in the previous article so we could make comparisons.

 

[Skurge]

Anyone knows how much of this story can be contributed to the new 11.4 drivers?

Compare launch drivers
http://www.anandtech.com/show/4061/amds-radeon-hd-6970-radeon-hd-6950/13

With 11.4
http://www.anandtech.com/show/4254/triplegpu-performance-multigpu-scaling-part1/4

Look at the 2x CF results. Some large improvements in some games. Crysis, Battleforge, Metro2033, Civ5 and Stalker.

 

[Lonyo]

Tri-fire faster than Tri-SLI isn't the whole story. They tested using triple monitors at an insanely high resolution. I'm wondering if that had anything to do with the performance results for two reasons:

1) On the NVIDIA side, each card gets one monitor while on the AMD side the primary card gets all three monitors. Perhaps Tri-SLI doesn't scale well in this exact circumstance. After all, supporting more than two monitors for NVIDIA cards is essentially a driver hack. How about a single monitor, maybe a nice 30" running 2560x1600 resolution? Besides, out of the five games tested, only one of those was able to run with average framerates above 60FPS (BFBC2 @65.0FPS) with the faster Tri-fire setup. Two of the five games averaged in the 30FPS range with Tri-fire.

2) The insane 5760x1200 resolution may have been too much for the lower amount of texture RAM in the GTX 580 to handle. How about a re-test using 3GB cards?

How about people just accept that AMD has better multi card scaling and catches up at higher resolutions with the 6000 series?

 

[Skurge]

How about people just accept that AMD has better multi card scaling and catches up at higher resolutions with the 6000 series?

Welcome to AT forums.

 

[formulav8]

How about people just accept that AMD has better multi card scaling and catches up at higher resolutions with the 6000 series?

Apparently thats why they did this new review. NVidia fannys were complaining that the first test wasn't fair, probably because nvidia got eaten alive when it comes to the price/performance you can get with AMD compared to nvidia. Now even with a new review giving the nvidia fannys what they wanted, they are still crying foul over there. The real truth is clearly that AMD is on top in many scenerio's. Just accept it. :\

 

[notty22]

Apparently thats why they did this new review. NVidia fannys were complaining that the first test wasn't fair, probably because nvidia got eaten alive when it comes to the price/performance you can get with AMD compared to nvidia. Now even with a new review giving the nvidia fannys what they wanted, they are still crying foul over there. The real truth is clearly that AMD is on top in many scenerio's. Just accept it. :\

LOL, yeah thats just what Nvidia fanny's wanted. If that was the case, they would have tested Civ5, Crysis 2, Mafia II with PhysX enabled, and then turned on 3D, oh thats 2 things AMD cards can't do. Thats a very narrow set of games/settings picked to make the AMD cards 'win'.

In a previous article.
Kyle has written a conclusion after choosing 2 of 4 games where AMD crossfire was broken. Thats a extreme example of his reviews , at times depending on the point he's trying to make. This time its AMD can provide a cost effective eyefinity experience, that would be much more expensive on Nvidia cards.
There is no getting around the price metric currently.
But games, resolutions, settings will return different endings. You can choose to accept any reality you want.

 

[Grooveriding]

LOL, yeah thats just what Nvidia fanny's wanted. If that was the case, they would have tested Civ5, Crysis 2, Mafia II with PhysX enabled, and then turned on 3D, oh thats 2 things AMD cards can't do

Why test those games, they're not GPU intensive, two of them are console ports in fact. Hardly anyone gives a flying toss about gpu physx and the 15 games in the world that use it, 80% of which are utter trash.

They picked the most intensive games around and the 580 Tri-Sli got taken to the cleaners with it's $500 more expensive pricetag.

It's an excellent review, because it highlights for a buyer considering wasting $1000 on 580 Dual SLI the fact that for the same money they can get faster performance from 6990+6970 Tri-Fire for the same $1000. And the icing on the cake is that the $1000 6990+6970 Tri-Fire is faster than the $1500 580 Tri-Sli setup as well.

There is no argument here. If the best one can muster up is turning on physx in one game or resorting to benches of a console port used with drivers that didn't support Crossfire, they may as well not come to the party.