CrossFire combination is much more interesting than SLI. If we take into consideration similarities between HD 3850 and HD 4670, owners of older cards can identify themselves with owners of HD 4670. Interesting detail is that two HD 4670 are more similar to one HD 4830 than to one HD 4850 but the price of two HD 4670 is almost identical to price of one HD 4850. Nevertheless, performances of two HD 4670 in CrossFire are very good and in most cases better than one HD 4850, despite the fact that two RV730 GPUs have 640 stream processors while one RV770 has 800. This is very interesting and we really don’t have any logical explanation for this situation.

If we take a look at performances and prices we can see that both combinations are very close. If you have CrossFire motherboard and one HD 4670, go for another HD 4670 and you will get performances that will allow you to play games up to 168x1050 resolution without any problems. For higher than that, maybe HD 4850 would be better solution because of its wider memory bus and more stream processors.

We are here giving advantage to GeForce 9800GT straight away, simply because it is just slightly pricier but it has much higher performance levels. More importantly GeForce 9800GT has 256bit memory bus and DDR3 memory that is much faster than DDR2 that was on GeForce 9500GT graphics cards that were in our test lab. This dramatically lowers memory flow and has negative impact on performance. This also means that this negative influence will be larger with larger resolutions. Unfortunately any recommendation for purchase of another GeForce 9500GT is lacking as it was the case when we tested single card systems and compared it to Radeon HD 4670 that was in the same price range.

Conclusion

Bottom line is that single GPU solution wins in final lineup although it’s not always faster solution. Nevertheless one combination showed that CrossFire/SLI systems have bright future: Radeon HD 4670. This relatively cheap but fast GPU has showed remarkable performances in CrossFire configuration where it surprised us overall with performance levels and price. Thanks to Radeon HD 4670, CrossFire systems still make sense when it comes to graphics cards with price around 70€.

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