Any decent cliché dictionary will tell you that two’s company but three’s a crowd, and graphics cards don’t come much more crowded than the EAH3850 X3 Trinity showcase card from Asus. It’s saddled up with three mini Radeon HD 3850 cards, attached to the main card via mobile MXM connectors. There’s a reason why this card has an air of the Heath Robinson about it, though - it was the result of a fun side-project by Asus’ engineers and R&D guys, and is not intended to ever make it to the shops.
Before we get onto the benchmarks, let’s have a look at the composition of this bizarre contraption, as getting three GPUs onto a single 290mm long card has required some pretty nifty engineering from Asus. Firstly, ATI doesn’t officially make Mobility Radeon HD 3850 cards for laptops so Asus has had to design and construct a mobile Radeon HD 3850 itself. And then Asus needed to design and make the main card that these three mobile cards connect to.
The three GPUs are clocked at 660MHz, and each have 512MB of 850MHz (1.7GHz effective) memory with a 256-bit memory interface. These are near-enough the usual clock speeds of a desktop ATI Radeon HD 3850, only shy by a few MHz here and there.
The GPUs still each have the usual 320 stream processors of a desktop Radeon HD 3850 too, and so (barring any bandwidth issues with the MXM connectors or elsewhere) the Trinity should perform like three Radeon HD 3850 cards teamed in CrossFireX mode. Asus told us that it couldn’t use Radeon HD 3870 GPUS, as that would lead to bandwidth issues. Impressively though, the Trinity only requires a single 8-pin PCI-E power connector while three separate Radeon HD 3850 cards would require three 6-pin connectors.
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