Over at Xbit labs they’ve taken a hard look at AMD’s new Radeon 5000 series, and focusing on the less powerful cards that sells in larger volumes. They earlier looked at CrossFire with two HD 5770 and compared this to buying a single HD 5870. They decided to try a new approach by mixing different models of graphics cards, something Crossfire should so just fine.
They try it by mixing HD 5770 from ASUS with HD 5750 from PowerColor. This setup has a total of 1520 ALUs, 76 TMUs and 32 RBEs, which should deliver about the same theoretic performance as HD 5870 sporting 1600, 80, and 32 of the same hardware specifications.
They wanted to test how far the development of CrossFire and SLI has come since the launch, when they needed identical cards with identical BIOS to make it work. The question is if you can find a second card of the exact same model when you can afford it? Combining HD 5770 and HD 5750 is also cheaper than a single HD 5870, which makes it all the more interesting.
To summarize, AMD/ATI has done well with enabling users to mix and match graphics cards, especially in newer games. This is more than they can say about NVIDIA.
:: Unusual Tandem: Asus EAH5770/2DIS/1GD5 and PowerColor PCS HD5750 1GB GDDR5 Premium Edition
