Quad SLI vs Quad Crossfire Heavyweight Showdown GTX 590 & HD 6990 Linus Tech Tips

The video opens with Linus motivating the comparison between quad SLI setups using dual GTX 590s and quad Crossfire setups using dual HD 6990s, aiming to measure scaling at a very high resolution of 2560x1600. He explains the hardware configuration, including a Gigabyte G1 Sniper motherboard and an overclocked Core i7-980X at around 4.26 GHz with 12 GB of DDR3 RAM, and notes a shift to a different test platform for this particular shoot. The host walks through the physical layout, highlighting the cooling considerations for the dual 6990 cards and the noise implications due to the large twin-GPU coolers, which affects the testing environment. He also describes the test methodology: using 2560x1600 with heavy anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering across a suite of games including Battlefield Bad Company 2, Crisis 2, Metro 2033, Crisis 2 and Lost Planet 2, with Lost Planet 2 benchmarked using a specific test profile. The early portion covers the decision to use the two PCIe x16 slots on the motherboard arranged to maximize bandwidth, noting that the bottom slot inhibits 16x when both high-end GPUs are used, hence the chosen configuration. As he proceeds, Linus prepares to run single-card baselines for both the GTX 590 and the HD 6990, followed by the quad GPU configurations, while promising results and cross-checks to ensure fairness across the tests. The video then pivots to capturing live benchmarks, declaring that Crisis 2 shows the strongest scaling from the 6990s and 590s, Ecosystems and driver behavior are shown to play a role in performance, and the comparisons are set against the backdrop of a noisy but powerful test bench. By the end of the initial setup, Linus emphasizes that the objective is not to crown a single winner but to illustrate the state of quad GPU gaming, while noting that there are driver and stability caveats to consider and that the numbers will be shown at very high resolutions, with the most impressive results coming in games that support heavy parallel rendering at 2560x1600. The segment culminates with a caveat that driver maturity and game scaling are still evolving for quad GPU configurations, but the potential for massive frame rates remains clear when the software and drivers are aligned, particularly in scenarios like Lost Planet 2 which underperforms compared to expectations in some tests, yet still demonstrates the overall viability of multi-GPU setups at extreme resolutions.

Topics · hardware benchmarking · graphics cards · technology