ATI Cross Fire

Summary:
-You need to buy an ATI chipset based MB (same as with Nvidia SLI) BUT :) You can use any existing ATI 800 series PCIx video cards you have with a new, matching crossfire card. That's a lot better (cheaper) than having to spring for 2 new Video cards. (I knew there was a reason I was holding off on my 64 BIT upgrade :) )

-This is a 4 slot implementation so you are going to end up without much expansion room.

-New AA and Anisotropic filtering improvements thrown in.

-ATI crossfire does not require you to have drivers that are tuned for your games so that Nvidia SLI drawback is avoided.

-You must match any existing cards' texture memory size and pixel pipeline count with the new cross fire card you buy.

-ATI is recommending a 475W "good quality" power supply.

-Cooling solution dumps heat out of the case.

Looks like the best price performance trade off may be with a pair of X800 series cards.
 
They are gearing it more for the "everything onboard" style of MoBo. Who needs expansion when it's built in? Only prob is what happens if one of them "onboard" goodies takes a nasty shiit and ya have to put an expansion card in? Or will they make the motherboards cheaper and disposable? Not likely. These video cards are getting a big as the MoBo they are installed on. Think of a Micro ATX with this setup on it.


"Damn, I know my motherboard's in here somewhere."
 
Yeah, I've had on board printer ports, USB, Sound adn ethernet crap out on different boards. I then limped along with a $10-20 plug in for a year or more afterwards.

I want my expansion slots. I use 3 minimum:
-Sound (which on a gaming machine is pretty much mandatory)
-Modem (for emergencies when the adsl goes down)
-Video Capture/TV Tuner (why pay for this with every new vid card?)
Others:
-2nd LAN Port
-New comm. ports when they are developed (firewire, usb, gighertz LAN)

Bad plan wasting all those slots.
 
gonaads said:
They are gearing it more for the "everything onboard" style of MoBo. Who needs expansion when it's built in? Only prob is what happens if one of them "onboard" goodies takes a nasty shiit and ya have to put an expansion card in? Or will they make the motherboards cheaper and disposable? Not likely. These video cards are getting a big as the MoBo they are installed on. Think of a Micro ATX with this setup on it.


"Damn, I know my motherboard's in here somewhere."


Well all i gotta say about this is my broke azz doesnt have the money for any of this :devious:

Also...that lil motherboard comment made me laugh. The way i read it in my head made me laugh for some reason :).
 
I'm glad ATI is fighting back against SLI. I have an X800Pro, and would love to get a matching card. Although, I think this would have to be PCI-E right? So maybe I'll just have to sell the X800Pro and rebuy something else. :p
 
hell, those PCI-express ATI cards are still somewhat small. look at friggin AGP 8X GeForce 6800's and stuff. they're pretty close to being as long as a normal sized mobo, and almost half the height of one.
 
gonaads said:
Only prob is what happens if one of them "onboard" goodies takes a nasty shiit and ya have to put an expansion card in? Or will they make the motherboards cheaper and disposable? Not likely.

Yeah, take a look what happened with the fan on my chipset...when I was having trouble booting the thing here. It'll run without the video (though a cold boot, some odd issues getting the gfx card up and running), but for the love of god, the onboard video was no solution to it not comming up (even to jossile it into playing with the AGP card, it had for a coupla years without incident). No doubt a heat issue... And that was just with a piddling GF2 GTS integrated (for the nForce 1 chipset). Throw 2 of these, running in parallel...

Now throw 2 cards in there, in SLI :eek: Good would be if they allowed one to integrate an additional card, with an on-board card of equivalent performance to allow one to upgrade... Get certain performance now, add some more latter...
 
Could be something cool , I would wait till 2nd gen at least , I mean who wants to throw all there $ at ATI and hope that their first mobo's actually work lol .
 
gonaads said:
They are gearing it more for the "everything onboard" style of MoBo. Who needs expansion when it's built in? Only prob is what happens if one of them "onboard" goodies takes a nasty shiit and ya have to put an expansion card in? Or will they make the motherboards cheaper and disposable? Not likely. These video cards are getting a big as the MoBo they are installed on. Think of a Micro ATX with this setup on it.


"Damn, I know my motherboard's in here somewhere."

gonaads if you look at the ATI pictures in that article, they where on micro atx boards.
 

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