ATI HD 4890, Single, Crossfire and Tri-Fire Tests

I had some spare time on my hands and a pile of older hardware so I decided to put something together with a few ATI HD 4890’s I had to see what these babies could do in a some what normal gaming rig. At the time these cards were released they were pretty good cards, but just how do they stack up now I wanted to find out.

I wanted to use a pure AMD setup for this so I picked out a AMD 955BE CPU that I had. This is a very good CPU and performed pretty well under LN2 and reached a top clock of 6.3ghz back when I ran these benches.

http://www.hwbot.org/community/submission/895259_buckeye_cpu_z_phenom_ii_x4_955_be_6313.75_mhz

The motherboard I will use is a Gigabyte 890FXA-UD7 which is a beauty of a motherboard.

For these tests I pulled the water block off and installed the NB Air Cooler that comes with the UD7

 

Lets get to the GPU’s here

With all the latest features, the ATI Radeon™ HD 4000 series graphics cards delivers the performance you need to take your high-definition experience to the next level at home, work and play. Watch Blu-ray movies and HD content play with incredible visual fidelity^1,2, enjoy unprecedented levels of graphics realism and play the latest games with support for Microsoft DirectX® 10.1. Do it all with break-through efficiency that doesn’t compromise performance.

Tear through the latest games with seamless frame rates and go beyond HD¹ with the power of the ATI Radeon™ HD 4890 graphics processing unit (GPU). Building on the strength of the ATI Radeon™ 4800 series award-winning architecture, this GPU stands out from the rest with massive graphics processing muscle. Take ultimate control over your game and crank it up with scalable performance. Go ahead, max out the settings and put the ATI Radeon HD 4890 through its paces.

Features & Benefits

• TeraScale Graphics Engine – The TeraScale graphics engine in the ATI Radeon™ HD 4890 features over one teraFLOPS, nearly one billion transistors and 800 stream processors so you can enjoy the high resolutions and fast frame rates previously only available with dual-card systems².
• Advanced Memory – GDDR5 provides twice the data per pin of GDDR3 memory at the same clock speeds.
• Enhanced Anti-Aliasing & Anisotropic Filtering – High performance anisotropic filtering and 24x custom filter anti-aliasing (CFAA) smooth jagged edges and create true-to-life graphics, for everything from grass to facial features.
• ATI CrossFireX™ Technology – ATI CrossFireX™ technology with up to quad GPU support offers superior scalability so your system is ready to level up when you are³.
• Power to Spare – This GPU has the brute processing power needed for physics, artificial intelligence, stream computing and ray tracing calculations.

Specifications for the ATI HD 4890 can be found >Here<

I have 3 of these cards on hand for these tests and I will be start of with one, then working my way all the way to three cards for Tri-Fire

 

I will begin these runs with a slight overclock to see what to expect.

Benching program I will be using is 3DMark Vantage

System Spec’s are:

Gigabyte 890FXA-UD7 with NB Air Cooler
AMD 955BE CPU
4gb Corsair 2000MHz 8-8-8-24 RAM
32gb MTRON PRO SSD for OS
Prolimatech Mega Shadow CPU Cooler with 2 fans
Corsair TX950w Power Supply
Windows 7 64bit

These cards have been around the block a few times so they are a little beat up looking

 

This is a basic run with the 955BE at 3.5ghz and 1010/1110 clocks on the single ATI HD 4890

This pulled a score of P12260 for this run.

3DMark Score: P12260
GPU Score: 12507
CPU Score: 11574

CPU temps were in a nice range with the Mega Shadow

Here is the power curve for this. This was total power draw for the full system.

Idle power draw was ~175watts and peaked at ~320watts under full load.

I will be using a CPU overclock of 4.0ghz and tighter RAM settings of 1600MHz 7-6-7 for the rest of the runs and a overclock of 1025/1175 for all GPU’s from here on out.

Here is 3DMark Vantage run for a Single ATI HD 4890

3DMark Score: P13077
GPU Score: 12899
CPU Score: 13639

So we had a nice jump in 3DMark Score with the new overclocks.

CPU Temps also stayed within acceptable range. This is what temps help for the CPU for the rest of the tests.

And total system power draw for the new overclocks

Idle power usage jumped a little to ~180watts and peaked at ~350watts under full load.

 

Let’s add a second ATI HD 4890 for a Cross-Fire setup

Using the same CPU 4.0ghz and 1025/1175 for the GPU’s for a Cross-Fire run with 3DMark Vantage.

This turned out to be a nice improvement over a single card run.

3DMark Score: P18948
GPU Score: 21925
CPU Score: 13463

Total system power usage for this run is starting to get a little high tho.

Idle power usage was ~235watts but peaked out at very close to 600watts.

 

Now for Three ATI HD 4890’s in Tri-Fire setup.

Using the same CPU 4.0ghz and 1025/1175 for the GPU’s for a Tri-Fire run with 3DMark Vantage.

Not as big a jump as it was going from a single card to Cross-Fire but with three cards I broke 3DMark Vantage Score of 20,000

3DMark Score: P20356
GPU Score: 24328
CPU Score: 13663

Total system power usage is again getting pretty high.

Idle power usage at ~250watts and cleared 720watts under full load.

 

The system I setup had no real OS tweaks and was basically a stock OS install that would be like what a normal user would use for gaming and other tasks that they would do every day.

As you can see by the graph that the biggest jump in performance was with a two GPU setup or Cross-Fire. Using a third card or Tri-Fire would only really be useful for really demanding games.

 

Total system power usage is something that should be taken note of when building systems like this. As expected going to multi card setups power usage can increase a great deal. This leads to extra heat output also.

I did not have a 4th card to test this for a Quad-Fire setup but I would expect total system power usage to become rather high at well over 800watts.

 

To wrap all this up I ran into something else that could be a rather large issue for some. When running these cards in a overclocked state and under full load fan noise can be a real issue.

As you can see in this video what a Tri-Fire system would sound like at idle and under full load.

Thanks for reading and I hope you enjoyed