We all knew that CrossFireX would bring new multi-GPU setups, but we did not expect anyone to actually use more than two cores with a single card. ASUS proved us wrong, as the Extreme AH3850 Trinity is a tri-core card. It has three RV670 cores cooled by a heatpipe construction and a water block, all in a single card. The card is still just a concept and it hasn't been decided when or if it will be released, however we do know that it works. This also means going one step further and actually jumping over the X2 version and straight to an X3 edition, if we can actually call it that way. And this does proof that also with the CrossFireX technology you can build some exotic and innovative products. - FudZilla

ASUS Extreme AH3850 Trinity Edition Board Preview

ASUS has chosen to use a kind of modular design where the two cores are located on the back and one on the front, each on their own daughter card. The cores are directly cooled by heatsinks and heatpipes that transfers the heat away from the cores to the heatsink located in the rear of the card, which in turn is cooled by a water block. And there are four DVI ports which can be used with up to four monitors, when CrossFire is deactivated. Along with the card comes a big water cooling unit which is fitted into two empty 5.25" slots. This will take up quite some room in your computer case and some optimization will be needed.

Sooner than expected, we've been served some more information about the prototype triple-core card from ASUS. The Radeon HD 3850 Trinity will sport three RV670 cores, all on separate MXM modules. First we did not know the exact specifications of the card, but those have been unveiled today. The core clock is 668MHz and each core has 512MB of GDDR3 memory running at 1656MHz, that's a total of 1536MB and 960 unified shaders if you want to get technical. We have been served with some benchmarks with the card, using an air cooled system and the card overclocked to the maximum setting.

In the Catalyst drivers that resulted for the ASUS Extreme AH3850 Trinity was able to be clocked all the way up to 769/2106MHz. This way it managed to achieve some quite impressive scores. The results in 3DMark03 has to be one of the highest single card scores we've seen, if not the highest. The overclock of the card is limited by the the lack of software tools and nothing else. We will surely see more of this card soon.