Hands-on: Four HD 4850 graphics cards on the trusty 4GHz QX9650

How good would four HD 4850 graphics cards perform on a trusty 4GHz QX9650? This may be a system setup that most people would never dream of having but then there are some who will want to know the results as they are the few that want it. Tweak Town has set to finding out the pros and cons of such a system setup with a hands on review spread over 11 pages.

In their final thoughts they said, “It seems that the Hot Fix driver should simply be called the “Increase your 3DMark score” driver. Apart from the two synthetic benchmarks, the only game to really see an increase in performance was Unreal Tournament 3. Outside of that, most games had a negative affect when adding more cards.

Hopefully this is something that AMD attack over the coming months. With more and more boards offering two or three PCI Express x16 slots, placing a third card into your system at these prices could be more than doable.

Two cards really is the sweet spot for HD 4850s at the moment; we see some good gains over a single card and the cost is still relatively low compared to the competition. Now all we have to do is wait for the HD 4870 so we can see what that can do for us.

AMD have a winner on their hands with the HD 4850; just don’t expect to see the same value for money as you start climbing the ranks with three or four cards. It could still be a while before we see these kinds of setups represent any form of value for money, much like NVIDIA with their Tri SLI GTX 280 setup”.

Read the 11 page review.