You may have seen a while ago that we examined a new chunk of hardware that – and this may be something of a blessing – will never make it to retail: the Asus EAH3850 X3 Trinity.

We were surprised and, dare we say it, a little impressed: Asus packed three 3850 chipsets onto one PCB and, remarkably, made it work. With water cooling and enough electricity to power Bill Gates’ cash machine – almost 300W for the card on its own, in fact. It didn’t really increase frame-rates much when compared to a single 512MB HD 3850 – adding 3fps to our high benchmark in Crysis – but it was certainly an interesting experiment.

We thought that, after taking a look at that particularly ludicrous piece of technological willy-waving, we’d seen the back of it – but it’s surprised us all by arriving back in the Labs with some brand new firmware that, we’re assured by Asus, will improve performance.

So, we’ll be back into the Labs in the next few days to provide some more results and evaluate whether Asus’ new firmware will make any difference to the card’s performance. No doubt it’ll be fun: our last foray into the world of the Trinity was certainly interesting. At first, the water-cooling didn’t work and then, when it did, we found that the pipes were the wrong way round. No wonder the three low-profile passive heatsinks were so hot that I cooked my dinner on them that evening.

At least, in theory, we know how to work the card now. Check back soon for some results as we try to eke some more performance out of the card. If you don’t hear anything from us, though, assume the worst: we’ve screwed up and the Labs has been burnt down after the card leaked and ignited our test rig. Who says that experiments aren’t fun, eh?