So you find yourself with four Sapphire HD 6970s, an Intel i7 3960X and an ASUS Rampage IV Extreme. It seems there's only one thing we can do - throw it all together and see what kind of FPS we get on our 30" monitor at 2560 x 1600.

It's been ages since we've tested 4-Way CrossFireX actually. Recently we did a bit of 3-Way CrossFireX action with the introduction of the Bulldozer and Sandy Bridge-E platform, but apart from that there hasn't been any real reason lately to expand from those numbers; that along with the fact that most boards support only up to three cards.

The introduction of the new high end platform from Intel means that we're starting to see 4-Way boards hit and our new X79 testbed which finds itself graced with the ASUS Rampage IV Extreme supports four way CrossFireX and SLI.

The performance today is going to be interesting; 4-Way scaling for both NVIDIA and AMD is something people have not really paid heaps of attention to because the cost associated doesn't yield the biggest gains over a 3-Way setup. Today, though, we're going to see what kind of performance we get over our freshly tested 3-Way setup and really, there's no better platform to test the setup on than the new Sandy Bridge-E one.

There's not a lot more that needs to be said. Like our other articles we'll be getting straight into the testbed side of things where we'll cover the setups we've got here today before we just dive into the fun stuff and see what kind of performance is on offer.