HotHardware got a chance to test and benchmark the EAH3850 Trinity, a trio of AMD ATI Radeon HD 3850 GPUs in CrossFireX mode for tri-GPU performance on a single card.  Their verdict? Performance isn't as high as it could be: going from a single Radeon HD 3850 to the three-way, single-slot device only raised Company of Heroes frame rates from 37 to 55 FPS at 1280x1024 with 4X antialiasing enabled. That's a 49% increase in performance from a 300% increase in GPU horsepower-not exactly jaw-dropping.

As many of you probably would ask, the answer is yes, it does play Crysis relatively well. However, in all honesty we expected better, more linear scaling overall. As a reference point, in our Company of Heroes testing, a single Radeon HD 3850 would score somewhere in the neighborhood of 37 FPS at 1280x1024 with 4X AA, whereas Trinity scores nearly 55 FPS. That's a 48% increase in speed but three times the GPU horsepower thrown at the task. In reality, this quick and dirty triple-GPU showcase from Asus probably suffers more from lack of driver optimization than anything else; that and probably a shortage of PCI Express bandwidth and latency over the on-board switch.