Introduction

Since the launch of the AMD Radeon HD 7970 we've looked at the reference model to see how it performs when the card sits on its own. With that done we then took the time to install a second reference design card into the mix and see how performance with the HD 7970 running in CrossFire.

Today we grab a third card and see what happens when we move to a three way CrossFireX setup. Since we've already looked at the Sapphire card in full detail in our CrossFire review mentioned above, we'll be getting into the performance side of things fairly quickly today.

The first thing we need to do is just take a quick look at our testbed, if you've been following our HD 7970 series of content, though, you shouldn't see anything out of the ordinary. Once we've done that we'll move onto the performance of the setup and see how it compares to other HD 7970s we've looked at.

When we've moved away from two cards and onto three and four card setups we've seen that performance can tend to get hit a fair bit. Quite often we don't see the gains we'd like to see and that ultimately makes three and four card setups quite overpriced and sometimes impractical. Still, the HD 7970 has shown us some wonderful performance so far... fingers crossed it translates over to today's 3-Way CrossFireX setup.