Fudzilla has just been informed that Catalyst 8.1 allows users to run CrossFire with one HD 3870 and one HD 3850. Of course, the site did put this in action, and were able to individually tweak each board's settings through the Catalyst Control Center. They ran a HD 3870 and 3850 in both 1GB and 256MB setups, and the performance gains are quite difficult to summarize in a sentence. The site expect to revisit testing when Catalyst 8.2 arrives.

In Half Life EP2 we can see that the cad mixing pays off and the overclocked HD3850 cards managed to score close to non overclocked HD3870 cards in Crossfire. Half life 2 loves the HD3870/HD3850 combination which gets you more than a 50 percent performance boost and this is what we expected from it. In this test we can see that ATI has done a great job, but it's really up to you to consider if this interesting feature of mixing affordable HD3850 with HD3870s is really worth it. This new capability might also be very interesting when upgrading your rig. As we've already said, we will get back to this topic as soon as the new CrossfireX driver becomes available so stay tuned.

Additionally, the site believe that when the official CrossFireX drivers appear, users should be able to run one HD 3870 X2, one HD 3870 and one HD 3850 simultaneously.