MSI 990FXA-GD80 Motherboard Review – AMD 990FX Chipset

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.

The MSI 990FXA-GD80 held nothing back in Aliens Vs. Predator. At 1280×1024 we saw a gain of 99.6%. At 1920×1080 we saw a gain of 98.5%. The performance difference between the ASRock 890FX Deluxe4 and the MSI 990FXA-GD80 is virtually non-existent.

Our Crossfire Results in Total War: Shogun 2 are looking much more promising than they did for SLI. At 1280×1024 the MSI 990FXA-GD80 saw a performance increase of 82.4% compared to the 79.6% of the ASRock 890FX Deluxe4. At 1920×1080 the MSI 990FXA-GD80 saw increase from 34.03 frames per second with a single XFX Radeon HD 6950 to 67.58 frames per second with a pair of them running in Crossfire for a gain of 98.6%!

In S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat the gains we saw between a single XFX Radeon HD 6950 and a pair of them in Crossfire weren’t all that impressive. At 1280×1024 we jumped from 102.4 frames per second to 118.2 in Crossfire. That is a gain of only 15.4%. At 1920×1080 the gains were better. We started out at 73.2 frames per second with a single card and jumped to 93.5 frames per second in Crossfire. That’s a gain of 27.7% which is nearly double the gain that we saw at the lower resolution..