My Trinity, 3870 X2, 9800GX2 and me
Of course, we've all heard about the latest technologies raging in town, including the AMD Phenom X3 and X4 processors and Tri- 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 HD 3870 X2 from the red camp, the 9800 GX2 from the green camp, and a pretty unique solution that we saw a month back but without concrete figures, the ASUS Trinity!
Made up of three MXM with a single Radeon HD 3850 core on each, ASUS went to the drawing boards and came up with this special product . 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 connector.
Let's take a look at the specifications of the three cards, presented to you in table form.
| ASUS Trinity 'Radeon HD 3850 X3' | ATI Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB | NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GX2 1GB | |
| Core Clock | 668MHz | 825MHz | 600MHz |
| Stream Processors | 320 per core | 320 per core | 128 per core |
| Stream Processor Clock | 668MHz | 825MHz | 1.5GHz |
| Texture Units | 16 per core | 16 per core | 64 per core |
| Raster Units | 16 per core | 16 per core | 24 per core |
| Memory Clock | 1.66GHz | 1.8GHz | 2GHz |
| Memory Capacity | 512MB GDDR3 per core | 512MB GDDR3 per core | 512MB GDDR3 per core |
| PCI-E Power Connectors | 1 8-pin | 1 8-pin, 1 6-pin | 1 8-pin, 1 6-pin |
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 watercooled only.
Mobile PCI Express Module, or MXM in short, is the result of a joint effort between NVIDIA and several leading notebook manufacturers. MXM was created for a consistent graphics interface designed for notebook systems.
However, ASUS has taken one step further by using MXM on its desktop graphics card, and with it comes the birth of the ASUS Trinity.
ASUS decided to drop much of the bells and whistles and went with a simple four port DVI output at the rear of the card.
