Of course, we've all heard about the latest technologies raging in town, including the AMD Phenom X3 and X4 processors and 3-Way and Quad SLI configurations from NVIDIA. In this article, we will be touching on the performance figures of the latest multi-GPU solutions available from both AMD and NVIDIA, namely the Radeon HD 3870 X2 from the red camp, the GeForce 9800 GX2 from the green camp, and a pretty unique solution that we saw about a month back but without concrete figures, the ASUS Trinity version. Made up of three MXM boards with a single Radeon HD 3850 core on each, ASUS went to the drawing boards and came up with this special and we believe somehow limited product. - VR-Zone

ASUS Trinity AH3850 X3 Video Board Version Review

You would probably assume that the end result is a really long card, but this triple Radeon HD 3850 card is just a wee bit longer than a NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GX2 and uses only one main PCB and a single 8-pin power connector. On the Trinity, the GPU cores are cooled by a heatpipe system, while the memory chips used by each core are cooled by simple aluminium heatsinks. The best part is, this card is designed to be water cooled only. This mobile PCI Express modules, or MXM in short, is the result of a joint effort between NVIDIA and several leading notebook manufacturers, so a bit strange to use it on an ATI desktop solution.

On the whole, the charts pretty much round up the performance of these three graphics monsters. The Trinity trails the Radeon HD 3870 X2 by about ten odd frames per second in Crysis and the deficit becomes glaring when you compare it against the GeForce 9800 GX2. However, it still manages to keep its own ground by giving rather good performance in Enemy Territory and returning the same performance figures as the Radeon HD 3870 X2 at lower resolutions in World in Conflict. Nevertheless, the ASUS Trinity is a fine piece of engineering concept which is not easy to design as a high performance piece of hardware.

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 3-Way CrossFire and hence poorer results when it comes to the pure gaming tests. However, as far as we know, the Extreme AH3850 Trinity will never be reaching production line.

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 3-Way SLI and Quad SLI, while ATI was touting its CrossFire and CrossFireX 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.