Introduction

Already really impressed with what the new HD 7800 series can offer, it's time to throw a second HD 7870 into the mix and see what kind of performance this $700 CrossFire setup brings to that table. If previous HD 7000 series cards are anything to go by, though, we should get some great performance with impressive scaling.

If you haven't looked at our individual reviews of the new HD 7800 series cards I highly recommend you head on over and check out our thoughts on the new $249 HD 7850 and more expensive $349 HD 7870.

Because we're dealing with reference cards today, and we've already looked at the model there's not a lot we have to do before we get into the testbed side of things. If you want to take a closer look at the cards we're using today then again I recommend you head on over to the standalone reviews we did.

The only thing we need to do is fire up GPU-Z and make sure that everything looks correct. Looking below you can see our cards are clocked at the default clock speeds which put the card at 1000MHz on the core and 4800MHz QDR on the 2GB of GDDR5 memory.

The other piece of information we want to make sure is correct comes in the form of making sure CrossFire is running. Having a look at the bottom you can see that it's indeed enabled and in the form of 2 GPUs. There's really not much more that has to be said so let's just look at our testbed and the cards we'll be using today in our comparisons before we get into the performance side of things to see what this CrossFire setup can do.