Gaming Platform Performance:

Performance on Gigabyte's boards is very good, if a little sporadic at times. It performs slightly better in Call of Duty 2 and World In Conflict, and is also consistently fast in Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, but falls slightly short in Team Fortress 2. TF2 is more CPU and memory dependent, so that could be a reason for the DS5 dropping a few FPS with CrossFire enabled, but it's still just as fast with a single card.

Overall, the X38 chipset is faster in CoD2 and ET:QW by offering up more bandwidth from the dual X16s than the x16/x4 on the P35. We couldn't get World in Conflict to finish the timedemo on any of the boards we tested it with when we ran X1900s in CrossFire using the latest Catalyst 7.10 drivers, it simply crashed out all the time. Using a single card or without enabling CrossFire the test was fine however. We also tried a pair of HD2600 Pros using internal CrossFire (not old external dongle types) and found the problem persisted.