Eurocom, one of the more popular high-end system builders, has decided to test Nvidia's current flagship mobile solution against current ATI Mobility flagship and although we are looking at a test of a single GPU against Crossfire solution, the results are very interesting. Eurocom offers both solutions in its Leopard 18.4-inch notebook, and after couple of tests it is clear that the ATI Mobility HD 5870 CrossfireX is much better than the Nvidia GTX 480M.

Tested configuration of Eurocom's Leopard included Intel's Core i7 940XM 2.13GHz CPU, 4GB of DDR3-1333 memory and a 256GB SSD drive, paired up with a single Nvidia GTX 480M 2GB GPU and two ATI Mobility HD 5870 GPUs with 1GB of GDDR5 per GPU. When it comes to performance, ATI Mobility HD 5870 CrossfireX scores 18274 in 3DMark06 while Nvidia GTX 480M scores 15626 in the same test. Unfortunately for Nvidia, performance isn't the only thing where ATI wins as the dual GPU solution draws only 10W more while offering 17 percent higher performance.

To make things worse, Nvidia's GTX 480M GPU is over US $200 more expensive than the dual-GPU ATI option. Eurocom also pointed out that ATI's dual-GPU solution is much easier to cool down as it offers more diffused heat generation as we are talking about two GPUs that need 55W of power while Nvidia's GPU is a single solution that needs 100W of power.

ATI clearly wins this one, and as you know, the new Mobility GPUs are coming and can only be faster and better.