4-Way CrossFire HD 6870 - One Of The Most Obscure Multi-GPU Setups

[@PixelPipes]

Did Quad SLI ever scale that well? I don't recall it doing so. This took a lot of time and effort and you should be immensely proud of what you've produced!

[@FullyBuffered]

Thanks for the kinds words man! :)

[@hubzcaps]

Yo whatup g. Fan of your unboxings and pci madness

[@nosirrahx]

When SLI used to get a lot of reviews you would see decent scaling to 3 cards occasionally but I don't remember seeing good 4 way scaling ever.

[@primus711]

Always depended on the game but yes it could

[@kevinerbs2778]

Newer cpu can push these. Cards now.

[@ViperDent]

I recently played around with HD5450 crossfire and Mafia 2 showed 100% scaling. Perhaps it's another title you could try when testing crossfire. Well done for all the hard work!

[@tobiwonkanogy2975]

actually my favorite cards to crossfire. I have always desired 4x 2gb versions to try out . ppl still want 40 -50 $ for one . the versions I have are xfx 512 mb and sapphire 1gb. Temper your expectations and they can do some things yet.

[@bjornna7767]

Also remind it being dependend on the actual game. There was a wide range between bad and good scaling, though.

[@sovo1212]

These cards usually scale well because they're doubling the bandwidth from 64 to 128 bit, which is far more beneficial than going from 128 to 256 on mid range cards.

[@m8x425]

@@sovo1212 The VRAM doesn't stack nor does the Bus, as those are dedicated to their respected GPU. This is like Crossfire/SLI 101

[@sovo1212]

@@m8x425 Technically the bus does not "stack" but you will have two 64-bit "highways" running in parallel, effectively doubling the bandwidth. The VRAM doesn't stack,, but I'm curious about why in this video it's actually quadrupled. Maybe it was a misreading by the overlay, or it was a thing on older setups.

[@F2FTech]

Amazing work! I can imagine how much time went into this video, so please throw this man a like 👍

[@kevinvanneste2500]

Will there be new content on your channel sometime in the future?

[@F2FTech]

@@kevinvanneste2500 Not at this point.

[@FullyBuffered]

Thanks Mike! :D

[@leadergames0661]

Sheesh, this thing has more heatpipes than most commercial freezers 🔥🧯🧯

[@davidromero4468]

These oddities from the past fascinate me. My cousin had a SLI setup back in like '07. I was so jealous! He also had a raptor 10k rpm hdd that I wanted so bad. Today's kids with their m.2 nvme ssd's dunno the loading struggle.

[@ScrawnyNerd]

Those dell peripherals you have are giving me flashbacks to elementary school computers, and playing cool math games

[@scottgetz8233]

This guy might murder people on his spare time but his videos are great

[@tmangaming91]

I still have one of these, always wanted a second one to try exactly what you did. Thank you.

[@aqua-technic]

It's criminal that you don't get more views and subs man, your content is so well presented and very in depth. Superb work 👍

[@FullyBuffered]

Many thanks :)

[@ClassicTechUK]

Great video and props to you for getting this setup fully working. Keep up the good work.

[@FullyBuffered]

Thank you!

[@alexjohnson7509]

It amazes me that this technology was abandoned. Especially with expliciy mgpu control now available in DX12, this kind of support would have been a godsend in the gpu shortage, as 2x RX 580s or GTX 1060s would have been a fraction of the cost of the comparable single 2070 Super or 3060ti. Just because SLI didn't work because of how it split the load, that doesn't mean that mgpu wasn't a brilliant idea. It just needed proper support and even eventually a well performing open source implementation.

[@86400SecondsToLive]

Yeah, giving people a reason to buy more GPUs during a shortage is genius. /s

[@TheMetroRetro]

keep on doing your vids man, they are getting better every time and I always enjoy watching old and weird hardware put to use

[@FullyBuffered]

Thank you, that's great to hear! :) I will continue to do so!

[@benh745]

This brings me back to the HD3870x2 on my First gen Maximus Formula. Really like that you show off all that cool older hardware. They sure made same kickass stuff back then.. keep it up

[@vukos]

Another excellent video about rare old-school hardware. Thanks!

[@FullyBuffered]

Thanks Vukos!

[@Kagotza]

I briefly owned a Club 3D HD 6870X2 back in the day. This brings back memories :)

[@Space_Reptile]

regarding the soft touch plastic, you can rub that rubber coating off w/ a sponge/rag soaked in rubbing alcohol or ethanol, it does not harm the plastic and it looks like new afterwards

[@FullyBuffered]

Thanks for the tip!

[@Knaeckebrotsaege]

Had to do this on my Logitech MX518 Refresh mouse where the rubberized coating had turned into chewing gum while in storage. I try to avoid anything that comes with rubberized coatings now cause it'll inevitably turn to goo at some point

[@mrttype]

Thanks for doing this video. I have a Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD9 waiting around for 2/4 SLI/CrossFire. Not sure that I’ll bother now. Saved me a lot of f***ing around and finding out.

[@metalheaddw05]

I was one of the crazy people running 4 6950s(modded to 6970) and later on 4 way SLI original Titans :P

[@bjornna7767]

Well, that's amazingly crazy 🤠

[@DOOM.Fi3nd]

One of the coolest PC setups ever. The flex you have with 4 GPUs cannot be matched lol

[@i3l4ckskillzz79]

Isn't it even a bigger flex when you have just one gpu beating the shit out of this quad gpu setup?

[@gonzo3915]

Fascinating insight, many thanks.

[@FullyBuffered]

Thanks Gonzo! :)

[@Sonyfreak]

Thank you for this interesting video on these rare cards! As far as I remember, there were 2GB Radeon 6870s as well. I wonder if the additional VRam would have helped.

[@FullyBuffered]

Thank you! And yes there were a few 2GB 6870s indeed

[@TEchWIse2203]

Those are huge gpu’s Like ur video style man keep it up

[@FullyBuffered]

Thanks man :)

[@NuffMan_]

I had two HD6870 in crossfire, clocked at 1Ghz with Phenom x6 1100T at 4Ghz After that i've had 6990, gtx 480's, r9 290x's, voodoo2 sli and some others, and only the 6870 was one that worked really well, ive only had problems running spintires with it but i think it wasnt even a dualgpu game. I got nearly twice the performance in bioshock infinite, over 90FPS everything at max at 1600x1200 resolution

[@rainsf0rd]

love your channel man! I used to have 3x HD 6950 (flashed to 6970s) in tri-fire. Some games worked well and others had really bad frames. Microstutter was an issue for a lot of things. Still a fun setup though!

[@FullyBuffered]

Thanks! That would have been an awesome setup!

[@scarecrowdynamics298]

this deserves so many more views!

[@FullyBuffered]

Many thanks! If you know people who might find it interesting, please do share it :)

[@mythologicalz]

Really cool video, honestly surprised at how many games scaled with 4 way

[@FullyBuffered]

Thanks Myth!

[@RetroGPUsandBuilds]

good job getting these to work! and a fun video to watch

[@FullyBuffered]

Thank you!

[@yosuhara]

Such an interesting video! Thank you!

[@FullyBuffered]

Glad to hear you liked it!

[@swag-cc4uc]

Amazing you got the drivers to work 👍

[@FullyBuffered]

Thanks! It took a long time to get everything working as intended

[@gordonfreeman320]

Just found your channel, love your content! Keep it up!

[@FullyBuffered]

Thank you! :)

[@johnkaufmann4711]

I thought the performance would of been better. Thought about this set up for mech warrior . Thank for the hard work .

[@drumsmoker731]

Nice vid, thanks for taking the effort for making it. One question: so four 1GB cards in CF are still limited like it would be only 1GB? Did SLI have the same problem?

[@yosuhara]

Yes they do. Ram on multi-gpu cards doesn't add up.

[@Azraleee]

Not with any protocol available in the consumer space. Nvlink and The Infinity Architecture allow this in the Enterprise space.

[@sadrhogollsodia9505]

lol I'm still running a single 6870... I'm currently working on upgrading. Just bought my Zen3 Ryzen 7. Kinda wish I could afford the new Zen4 chip and mobo, but that would make it so I wouldn't be able to upgrade until sometime next year. Graphic cards are coming down in price so fast it's amazing to see. Love it.

[@austinwahl2945]

miss my 7970 ghz xfire setup. I still have them in my shelf, this was all when 1440p overclockable korean monitors came out and I needed that extra power to play battlefield 4. For BF3 I actually ran sli GTX 550 ti's . The 7970's actually ran great , some game took some work to get it decently playable however. Was running 1125 core and a slight memory overclock if I recall on them for a long time. I still remember getting both of them used off ebay for like $100 each.

[@dazley8021]

I had one GTX 690 for some time. It was a beast, but as SLI goes, also had problems ^^

[@RealSteveStevenson]

I think this guy's a robot. Also, why didn't he use mantle in BF4? It was amazing to use for Radeon cards, although I don't know if it supported cards that old. The only reason Nvidia stopped supporting sli is because they didn't want people being able to buy lower end, cheaper cards and using sli to combine their performance together, beating the performance of their more expensive cards - thus forcing people to pay more money for more performance. They say things "like oh we don't need to SLI anymore because the cards are powerful enough", but really it's all about money. I imagine AMD has the same thoughts now that they're back in the card market

[@mattparker9726]

I love content like this, it really shows the improvements in GPUs in the last ten years. Even in TR where the 4x crossfire 'beat' the 1060, I bet that 1060 was FAR more enjoyable to play.

[@Magicairsoft9]

But the nvidia 1060 is 5 generations newer than amd 6870.

[@ChadKenova]

I love collecting gpu’s been trying to find a gigabyte 680 super overclock for my collection. I dont go much further back than something like a 8800gt though. But i find all the designs and specs of all the older cards very interesting. My first pc had a 486 but the first system I built had a e8500 8800gt.

[@cromulence]

Back in 2012~2013 I built a gaming PC from second hand parts - An i5 2500K, 4x4GB RAM, a 120GB SSD, a 2TB HDD, and 2 XFX 2GB 6950s that were early revisions that could be flashed with the 6970 firmware. I recall CrossFire working incredibly well across a ton of games - of course AMD drivers were never as good as NVIDIAs, but it was a monster machine at the time- all in a Corsair Carbide Air 540 case. Later in 2014(?) I traded that machine and a 2012 MacBook Air for a 2012 MacBook Pro Retina - good times.

[@bryantallen703]

DOOM 2016 and Sniper Elite 3 and 4 are some great DX11,12/Vulkan titles. I was able to run Sniper Elite 3 maxed out almost with 2 1GB GDDR5 GTS450's in SLi. Multi GPU setups can be really flaky sometimes. Out of my 2 GTS 450's, one prefers to be the #1 card and the other way around just does not work... I wonder with using Vulkan it might be possible to run these. I know there are DX12 multi-GPU capabilities that allow you to run nVIDIA and AMD GPU's together. Most notable is Ashes of the benchmark. Being that these are most likely limited to DX10 and maybe DX11, there could be some fun modding involved.

[@obsoletepowercorrupts]

How many monitors can you run of those two hd6870 cards and how do they behave in terms of functionality _(such as if they function merely as desktop screens or as gaming screens spreading an image)?_ Does the AMD software behave well compared to nView? I see the nvidia 550 is compared. Really nview wants a nvidia650 or better (thereby not so much the 550), and so I wonder if these AMD cards are better than the 550 in terms of having good software like AMD 'hydravision' or 'eyefinity'. Cheers.

[@MasterDrood]

This is amazing I didn't know there was a dual die 6870

[@JustAGameShow]

Right now, I have a second PC with Windows 7, running an i7 990x CPU, 500Gb SSD and it has a 3 way SLI with Nvidia GTX 570 HD's.. Never skipped a beat and I've not come across a game I normally play that it won't run.. Duly granted, some of the newer titles insist on windows 10, but the games I play all perform really well on it.

[@kevinvanneste2500]

Great video!

[@FullyBuffered]

Thanks Kevin!

[@alanveyck6986]

Nice review 👍👍 bro

[@FullyBuffered]

Thank you!

[@LegacyIvyTerascale]

gotta love the green and red PCB's

[@homelessEh]

crossfire was so neat.. i remember squeeing with mild joy when enabling hybrid crossfire with the addition of a hd3450... that was fun back then.. after running hybrid crossfire for a little bit we aimed for 2 hd4670's which was a Very cool solution requiring no extra power but when it worked it WORKED.. Good times ...oh then a hd4890 and a hd4870 were crossfired.. at the cost of a power supply lol that didnt work so well as the cpu was not willing to keep up with both cards horrible performance lol with the 48;s

[@captain1334]

Back in the day my dad had a pc with 4 of these for a 8-way CrossFire setup it was a beast but it was expensive as all hell

[@renlam2905]

I wish your build a system with quadfather mobo + these 2 card. Would be the pinnacle of multi procesor systems 😅

[@HairyScrambler]

I am awaiting the 760 x2! I'm curious to see how battlefield 4 will run on that card as well as if it also has a finger for quad sli support. I'm also curious as to how much vram each GPU gets per card, if they did 2gbx2 or since there was a 760 4gb, perhaps 4gbx2 per card amounting to 16 gb total vram. It seems like a rather odd GPU to put two of on on one card; you'd think they would've done that with the 780 ti even just go through with a mars 780 ti 6 gb model

[@mibfox]

Used to have 6870 once. Great card for solid money back in time. GCN 1 :)

[@nooneisback]

Funnily enough, I got a nearly perfect 1.7x performance scaling in GTA V on my old 2xHD7970 setup. Either nobody bothered optimizing that game for the 6000 series, or they assumed nobody would ever run it in a 4xGPU setup.

[@GamingLovesJohn]

The power consumption is killer... Jesus.

[@bjornna7767]

Or a saviour in winter times.

[@bjornna7767]

I would totally vote for Green parties an run this setup for oldschool gaming and heating in winter.

[@JohnSmith-iu8cj]

I think you were wrong in terms of the vram being only 1gb. As far as I know, in crossfire the vram does actually add up, in contrast to sli.

[@cesarquijada8405]

Tome su "Me gusta", me gusto tu tono de voz y me encanto el contenido. Creeme que aqui en latinoamerica nunca o casi nunca se hablo de AMD, mucho menos de tarjetas de alta gama o ediciones especiales como la 3870X2 o la 6870X2. Yea con los "Crossfire" de antes de las R series, lo mejor de construcciones para entusiastas. Saludos, estare pendiente de mas videos tuyos. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Take your "Like", I liked your tone of voice and I loved the content. Believe me that here in Latin America we never or almost never talk about AMD, much less high-end cards or special editions such as the 3870X2 or the 6870X2. Yea with the "Crossfires" from before the R series, the best of builds for enthusiasts. Greetings, I will be waiting for more videos of you.

[@Mini-z1994]

Huh that's cool, didn't know there were dual gpu HD 6870 on a single pcb like that, at least didn't remember it. I've tried a HD 6990 (which in games that supported crossfire was a pretty fast card.) Could be interesting doing crossfire with a single HD 6870 & one of these gpus, as tripple crossfire has a in general better support then quad crossfire.

[@FullyBuffered]

Thanks for the comment, the 6990 is an awesome card! The AMD drivers to allow to run these cards in a 3-way configuration, so that is something I could test in the future.

[@Mini-z1994]

@@FullyBuffered Also if you want another hefty dual gpu solution. The powercolor Devil 13 R9 390x2 takes up 4 slots on it's own, still has current driver support too ofc. Gonna need another powersupply though for this space heater www.tweaktown.com/news/47425/powercolors-new-dual-gpu-16gb-vram-requires-1000w-power/index.html Cant forget the asus mars gpus that had a few dual gpu models as well, asus mars 760 which was 2 gtx 760s on a single pcb. Galaxy had a dual gpu or two as well, dunno if they were anything beyond prototypes though, was both a gtx 470 dual & gtx 460 dual gpu.

[@waffleurr]

I have a strong feeling that the author used to do ASMR in the past

[@gettoecoding1058]

Holy crap does club 3d still exist, forgot about those cats

[@阿綸的全勳學院]

So Great. 4-Way CrossFire

[@kodato92]

I had a quad CFX with powercolor ones, dual 6870x2

[@wskinnyodden]

GTA5 performance issues are not due to bad hardware, they are due to poor buggy software. The load times "patch" which speeds up loading time 10 to 100 times in some cases (and will speed up every case) should in fact be named a "bug fix". And trust me when I say, that game has a lot a bad coding that should be reviewed and fixed. I would bet a month's wages that once all the crap is fixed this quad Crossfire setup would see considerable performance increases.

[@gettoecoding1058]

The most expression i have ever seen in a video 😂 , still a good video with detailed info 👍

[@LegacyIvyTerascale]

if you use MSI AB anyway, you can fix the 1% and 0.1% by limiting the FPS at 60 with Riva Tuner i use it for GTA III , GTA San Andreas , NFS Most Wanted ( 2005 ) and Soldier of Fortune

[@Hugosanches594]

How i saw your video of 390vs970. Now with the 6800xt vs 3080 we have a similar situation, where we have 2 similar cards in fps but amd with more vram, i was searching to compare r390 vs 980 in 2020 but i think that 970 worth to ask too. My question is : is there any game that you could play in r390 in 1440p and with 980/970 don’t? Or maybe 1080 but with ultra graphic setting sand 980/970 just could in high graphic and doesn’t in ultra? I’m trying to figure out if in the last time that we have this situation with the years the double of vram was enough to do a difference in graphic settings games

[@AshenTechDotCom]

you should try the nimez drivers for testing these older cards, also, install Radeon Pro, titles that lack a profile can be forced to use afr or even nolonger supported modes that last i checked still technically work because some titles used those modes, the mode that splits the screen and has each card render a strip worked amazing on some titles not the max fps possible but min fps jacked way up and zero stutter... honestly, like sli, you can even create full custom profiles, though nvidia profile inspector can just load user created and shared profiles and install them for you.. i dont know of anything quite that simple for amd... but... i can say you can install a much more up-to-date driver pack that will have a stack of newer profiles built in.. a buddy of mine actually has a set of these, and a set of 295 cards that both work better with the user updated driver pack... also ulps needs disabled to avoid some titles causing bugs... i know its weird but..sometimes ulps kicks in and sleeps gpu's it thinks arent being used.. even at times when they actually are... i say this having used cf for years, and using dual 1070 level cards at the moment... ;)

[@haydn-db8z]

Yeah, I was wondering if he'd tried Nimez as well. :)

[@attiliobaldo9308]

hai una voce stupenda, complimenti!

[@xX_illusion_Xx]

So basically this would be similar to two HD6990's, (Also dual GPU but 4GB per Card), with less ram?

[@seirp]

I would like to see a new dual gpu again, vulkan promised to be better to crossfire/sli so who knows how it would be nowadays

[@knightsun2920]

can you try out a triple card setup with a regular HD 6870?

[@ProcessedDigitally]

nice work

[@7838-h2d]

if you still have your Quadfather system could you please try one of these or both it would be epic

[@CSHracer]

damn that GPU sag is bad!

[@JohnWilliams-gy5yc]

The FED surely is one of the subscribers. FED: GPU inflation must be stopped. Home Owner: Should've sold my GPU at crypto peaks.

[@hblankpc]

Have you played around with Terascale in Win8.1 at all?

[@FullyBuffered]

No I haven’t tried 8.1

[@metalheaddw05]

The reason your RAM usage went up in BFV is because you were spilling over from the maxed VRAM

[@B3L13V3R]

Quad SLI annnnnd AMD... you are a saint!!

[@CMDRSweeper]

I am late, but most of the artifacts you see in this is due to developers abandoning the old HD lineup of cards for development. So even if you ran a HD 7xxx you would still see the same issues of flickering textures and weirdness. As for whom would get these, well it was mainly the Nvidia guys, or to be specific, if you were unlucky enough to run a Core 2 motherboard with the nForce chipset. Nvidia actively disabled inter PCI-E communication if it detected a GPU with a different vendor name than Nvidia to prevent Crossfire from working, however with a dual GPU on a single board, you could get away with it. Although you may still have to fight it a bit if you had a 780i chipset, but these boards were such stinkers that fighting them was commonplace, but the reason for this was that the 780i was basically a 680i with modified CPU power delivery and a NF200 PCI-E bridge chip installed, to fake PCI-E 2.0 compatibility.

[@alzarpomario889]

If you still have the cards could you test Amernime drivers?

[@thunder_kick]

currently scavenging for HD4870s so i can put them on my quad PCIe slot MSI K9A2 Platinum for quad crossfire with a 6-core phenom ii

[@mordecaiepsilon]

Did you snipe some hwbot scores?

[@FullyBuffered]

Sadly not, but I would like to revisit them to do so

[@catlehubkalyanpur]

I feel you!

[@homelessEh]

me and a buddy used hd6870 and hd6850's TO DEATH .. having to use the oven fix on them a few times to revive for a while but they are pretty butched now .. the shrouds are gone the fans have been mcguyvered.. we used them for 120% of the normal life cycle lol we pushed the boundarys with them for nearly a decade damn near now lol oh the hd6000s were gems for the time.. ohh terrascale how i miss you.

[@homelessEh]

2023 i found my self buying another hd6870 but this time its an xfx 2gb 6870 .. the 2gb really shines through.

[@georgehunter2124]

I love they heat pipe, very steam punk

[@GraveUypo]

damn, perfect scaling and it only barely edges a 1060 3gb. my 6950 was certainly not as powerful as i remember it being, lol. it's funny, i still remember even my radeon 9800 pro as a fps-chucking monster even though my fridge has more gpu power than it nowadays

[@noticing33]

It's all down to game development it seems, crossfire/sli could breath sooo much life into old cards

[@diegodevops4151]

Nice video! Subscribing.

[@loko1505]

Hi brother. I have one of that same gpus. Yesterday I broke the big fan and I can´t locate a replace, and I have seen you have one card with an another fan. Could you maybe tell me the model or the size? I give you my like and sub:))

[@these.are.my.things]

I ran this setup back in the day. I found pretty poor performance in everything except synthetic benchmarks. when it did run ok stutter was really bad.

[@siralinamaz]

thx man

[@HeadShot013]

Nice! Bro

[@rattlehead999]

It wasn't obscure back in the day. The 2x6870 and 2x6970 were very popular back in the day, even if people didn't buy that many of them, since they costed a lot in their day.

[@JamesSmith-sw3nk]

Good video. A synthetic test like 3D Mark Vantage would have been great to include.

[@yosuhara]

Watch the whole video, there is a synthetic benchmark test.

[@JamesSmith-sw3nk]

@@yosuhara What is the time stamp? I thought I watched the whole video.

[@yosuhara]

@@JamesSmith-sw3nk 18:05

[@JamesSmith-sw3nk]

@@yosuhara Thanks.

[@FullyBuffered]

I will add time stamps later on

[@garhpd]

All that sagging is going to damage those old cards. Need some kind of support asap

[@Mong00se]

in 2015 i had a 2 hd6850 in crossfire. most of the time it was awful, when gta5 relased, the game had no cf support xdd but the system works fine in benchmarks. catalyst 13.4 was the fastest one

[@nexxusty]

The lows though.... That has always been the problem with Multi-GPU. There's literally only ONE game that does this properly, Strange Brigade. It's the only game I've ever played with Multi-GPU, that seemed like I was playing with one.

[@DanielGT_93]

i think this is beautiful,but impratical. 1% low and 0.1% low are more important than hiting a lot of fps.

[@SidneyCritic]

When he's narrating stuff the talking is adequate enough to hear what is being said, but that taking-to-cam mic has no treble, ie, it sounds muffled, and is hard to hear.

[@paveljelinek772]

Where ya from buddy? You sound like central europe

[@FullyBuffered]

The Netherlands!

[@paveljelinek772]

@@FullyBuffered oh, i was close 👍

[@iangreenhalgh9280]

Sadly, due to electricity costs, no-one is going to want to run a pair of 300w cards in 2022. :(