MSI 870A Fuzion review

Enabling the mainstream to mix ATI and Nvidia in multi-GPU setups

MSI 870A Fuzion
Nvidia and ATI cards can live together in harmony (dogs and cats still a lost cause, though)

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Setting up the Lucid's Hydra 200 chip on MSI's 870A Fuzion poses very few problems – just make sure you have all the graphic card drivers loaded before you start to load the Hydra software and you're away.

You also have to make sure that the output to the monitor is plugged into the first graphics card of whichever pair you have installed, but that's fairly standard for this multi-GPU malarkey.

We've put it up against Asus' flagship CrossHair IV Formula board. That's based on the superior, though pricier AMD 890 chipset so that explains its slight performance advantage in the basic motherboard benchmarks.

As you can see from the benchmarks, the performance varies somewhat depending on which game you chose to use. The list of games that the Hydra chip supports is growing all the time and most of the currently popular ones are already listed.

If in doubt, check the release notes that accompany the driver.

3D rendering performance

MSI 870a fuzion benchmarks

MSI 870a fuzion benchmarks

Video encoding performance

MSI 870a fuzion benchmarks

MSI 870a fuzion benchmarks

DirectX 10 gaming performance

MSI 870a fuzion benchmarks

MSI 870a fuzion benchmarks

DirectX 11 gaming performance

MSI 870a fuzion benchmarks

MSI 870a fuzion benchmarks