Asus EAH3850 X3 Trinity, world’s first benchmarks of triple-GPU card

Posted at: Tuesday 8th April 2008 by Ben Hardwidge

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.