For what its worth. I had the same issue.

I am running Windows 8.1 Preview, with Catalyst 13.11 Beta so take this with a grain of salt.

@ Stock i7-920 speed 2.66Ghz both cards will run at 50% utilization.

Running the FFXIV:ARR Benchmark will result in a score within 300 points with Crossfire Enabled/Disabled.

Changing resolution and settings to Laptop - Normal did not change the frame rate (15-20FPS in cities, 40-60FPS outside. FFXIV:ARR Bench score of about 6500.


I over-clocked my CPU to 3.5Ghz which is the max Stable without increasing voltages.

FFXIV:ARR - Single 6950 6,800 points. Dual 6950 in crossfire 10,620 points.

GPU Utilization is 95-98% on both cards, Average frame rate in the benchmark is 101FPS .

I am not sure why CPU speed has such a huge influence. The CPU runs at about 40% with some cores maxing out at 80% utilization at 2.66Ghz. There is no change in that behavior at 3.5Ghz.

I went "extreme" and ran the benchmark at 4.0ghz. There was no perceptible increase in performance over 3.5Ghz.

Don't get me wrong. 900mhz is a big boost.


My resolution is 1920x1200. I have two 1GB Radeon 6950's A Core i7-920 and 24GB of DDR3 1600 RAM.

A friend of mine has a Phenom 960T and Crossfire 6850's. So it shouldn't be a CPU limitation he has not run the benchmark, but runs smothly at 60FPS VSync.