ASUS Sabertooth 990FX Motherboard Review

AMD CrossFireX Scaling Performance

As with the previous page where we tested the NVIDIA SLI scaling between the chipsets, we want to do the same for the AMD CrossfireX. When we decided to run this series of tests, we were able to get in touch with our friends over at XFX and they kindly sent over a pair of XFX Radeon HD 6950’s.

At 1280×1024 there was zero difference between the ASUS Sabertooth 990FX and the MSI 990FXA-GD80. At this lower resolution both boards saw a gain of 99.6%. At 1920×1080 we saw a slight difference in the gains though it’s not shocking there is a minimal difference. The ASUS Sabertooth 990FX saw a gain of 100.9% across the three runs while the MSI saw a gain of 98.5%.

Our Crossfire Results in Total War: Shogun 2 are much more promising than they were for SLI. At 1280×1024 the ASUS Sabertooth 990FX was able to average 47.25 frames per second with a single XFX Radeon HD 6950. Tossing in the second XFX Radeon HD 6950 the performance jumped by 83.3% for an average of 86.62 frames per second in CrossfireX. At 1920×1080 the performance gain was even more significant; we saw a single card performance of 33.98 frames per second and a Crossfire performance of 67.6 frames per second. That is a gain of 98.9% at 1920×1080.

In S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat the performance gains between a single XFX Radeon HD 6950 and a pair of them in crossfire aren’t all that impressive, to be honest. At 1280×1024 the ASUS Sabertooth saw a gain of only 16%. This is slightly better than the 15.4% we saw on the MSI 990FXA-GD80, though still not impressive. 1920×1080 did yield better results, though still not great. The ASUS Sabertooth 990FX saw a gain of 26.5%. This is the first time that the MSI 990FXA-GD80 scaled better in Crossfire with 27.7%. Though the ASUS Sabertooth 990FX did have better frame rates in both single card and Crossfire configurations