On the whole, the charts pretty much round up the performance of this three graphic monsters. The Trinity trails the EAH3870X2 by about ten-odd frames per second in Crysis and the deficit becomes glaring when you compare it against the 9800 GX2. However, it still manages to keep its own ground by giving rather good performance in Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, and returning the same performance figures as the EAH3870X2 at lower resolutions in World in Conflict.

Nevertheless, the ASUS Trinity is a fine piece of engineering concept. It is not easy to design a high-performance piece of hardware consisting of three individual cores to communicate with each other properly and effectively on the same PCB. 

With a simple heatpipe network as its main and only source of cooling, the card still runs cool and temperatures are acceptable. That said, the ASUS Trinity was able to complete the tests we threw at it without any hiccups, minus the annoying AMD driver issues. We strongly believe that the display drivers for ATI cards can still be polished much further. Another factor to consider is a unique triple-core setup. The drivers may be in-efficient in handling three-way CrossFire and hence poorer results when it comes to the pure gaming tests.

However, as far as we know, the ASUS EAH3850 Trinity will never be reaching production line.

 


The three cards in this multi-GPU shootout: ASUS EAH3870X2, XFX GeForce 9800 GX2 and ASUS EAH3850 Trinity.

 

The ASUS Trinity was created by ASUS to prove to the other manufacturers out there, why they are one of the industry's leaders. They were willing to spend some time and money and have managed to create something unique out of what people thought was never ever going to be possible. There was NVIDIA with Tri-SLI and Quad SLI, while ATI was touting its CrossFire and Quad CrossFire capabilities, but ASUS took it one step further by creating 'triple CrossFire' on a single card, and not only was it just triple GPU, but triple GPU on individual MXM cards slotted into one master PCB. Kudos to ASUS for the Trinity, and with that, we present the ASUS EAH3850 Trinity with VR-Zone's Most Innovative award.

 

 

 

 

With LCD prices going down, more enthusiasts are looking at buying bigger screens with higher resolution, which in turn require more graphics power when it comes to gaming. For instance, it is impossible to have a comfortable game of Crysis on a single GPU card when running high resolutions of 1920 x 1200 and up. Furthermore, having more than one GPU core on a single card eliminates the need for CrossFire- and SLI-enabled boards. Moreover, you will need an SLI-enabled board by NVIDIA in order to run SLI (except for Intel's Skulltrail).

The industry is moving towards multi-GPU and even integrating more than one graphics core into a single package for the high-performance gaming market. AMD is coming up with their much-awaited Radeon HD 4870 X2 next-generation graphics card, while NVIDIA has responded with its GeForce GTX 260 and GTX 280 dual core GPUs. For now, grab one of these cards featured here, chill and relax to your favorite game while waiting for the next-generation gems to roll out.