AMD Radeon HD 7750 CrossFire Review

When you take a quick glance at the 7750 you will notice that the card doesn’t have a CrossFireX port on the top, nor do they come with a bridge for connecting two cards together. This is not to say that they are not compatible. All the bandwidth that the cards require is catered for by the motherboard and this therefore makes setup the much easier for the novice user.

Before we come to mention the testing analogies that we use, its key that we highlight on how simple it is to setup a CrossFire configuration with two 7750’s. Whereas with high end cards, we need to make sure that there are extra PCI-e power cables available and that there is a CrossFire bridge ready to connect the two (or more) cards together, the 7750 requires none of this.

As we’ve mentioned the cards require no external power nor do they require an external bridge to connect the two together, this makes them ideal for a novice who has never setup a CrossFire configuration before.  Installation and initial setup is as simple as plugging the two cards in to two available PCI-e lanes and turning the computer on.  AMD’s Catalyst software will then detect that two CrossFire compatible cards have been installed and prompts the user with a message asking if they wish to connect the two cards together harnessing the power of CrossFire.

The test the performance of the two cards together, we use the latest drivers direct from the manufacturer and run each test three times to obtain a fair average set of results.

Test System:

• Asus Maximus IV Extreme-Z
• Intel Core i7 2700k
• 16GB Corsair Vengeance 1866MHz
• Corsair H80
• Corsair HX1050W
• Kingston V+ 100 128GB SSD
• Lian Li T60
• 3 x AOC E2795VH

We would like to thank AOC, Asus, Corsair, Kingston, and Lian Li for supplying us with our test system components.

Games used:

• Aliens Vs Predator
• Dirt 3
• F1 2011
• Batman: Arkham City – Due to issues with this game, no added CrossFire support has been included in DirectX 11 mode, though once a patch has been released to add this functionality, we will continue to use this for further CrossFire tests.
• Mafia II
• Metro 2033

Hardware used:

• Plug-in electricity usage monitor
• Sound level meter

Software used:

• 3DMark 11
• HWMonitor
• Unigine Heaven Benchmark
• Windows 7 Professional 64-bit