While NVIDIA has long been tolerant of their board partners tweaking reference designs and shipping overclocked graphics cards straight from the factory, AMD’s manufacturers have only had this luxury the better part of a year. Both companies have seen their board partners take existing products to a whole new level through some clever or ridiculous engineering methods. Diamond Multimedia in particular is notorious for tweaking AMD graphics cards with features like extra memory to pretty spectacular results. In the past we have even seen attempts at dual-GPU solutions direct from manufacturers like Gigabyte and Sapphire. Now ASUS is throwing their hat in the mix and taking things to a whole new level.

The ASUS EAH3850 Trinity is the first triple core graphics card ever attempted. Attentive hardware enthusiasts might recognize “Trinity” as the name of various past hardware projects, including an old one from AMD in 2006. The crazy prototype card from ASUS is really an amalgam of three water cooled MXM modules, each with their own RV670 core and memory. Each of these RV670’s will operate at 668MHz and sport 512MB of dedicated GDDR3 memory running at 1656MHz. Also, since each RV670 core has 320 unified shaders, the ASUS Trinity prototype has a grand total of 960. The watercooling system on the card looks proprietary and runs out of what appears to be a 5.25” module.

Nordic Hardware reports the card scores 24909 in 3DMark06, which is pretty high. However, the system was running on an Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9770 processor operating at 4.55GHz. Obviously this is playing a large role in the high score that was achieved, as we all know 3DMark06 is a pretty crappy test under default settings. The card used in the test is also heavily overclocked to 769MHz on the core and 2088MHz memory.

Although these scores are fairly promising, it is safe to say that such a card would be incredibly expensive if it ever makes it to production. Not only does it consist of three whole HD3850 MXM modules, but the extra engineering involved will garner a premium as well (read: 9800GX2). This card is far more valuable as a proof of concept that MXM modules might be used in desktop applications in the future.

Source: Nordic Hardware

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