ATI HD 4870 X2 Crossfire-X vs NVIDIA Geforce GTX 280 3-SLI
 

The XFX 280's come pre-overclocked and work fine individually, however if you slot three of them into a single system, they begin to heat up, considerably. I recorded load temperature increases from around 65c in single card to around 85c. Thankfully Ntune supports three cards at a time and you can individually toggle fan speed. Putting all three cards to 100% fan raises the noise levels, however it is bearable and it manages to help get things back under control and temperatures drop by a good 8-10c. In my testing the 280 cards are not so stable under extreme temperatures as the X2 cards.


Skulltrail is certainly far from perfect, it is tied down to fully buffered DDR2 memory which is far from cutting edge by today's standards, however as a gaming machine it is still more than capable of coping with anything today's titles can ask for. It works well with Nvidia's PhysX drivers, and I enjoyed a few late nights gaming with GRAW2. The benefits of being able to change to Crossfire and back without any system changes is another massive bonus point and I hope multiplatform motherboards start getting a hold in the marketplace, after all how many of you guys would like to hang onto the motherboard you just purchased if you fancy swapping from green to red or vice versa?

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