Pic of ATI Crossfire

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Trotter

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From theinquirer.net:

WE TOLD you many times before about ATI's way of doing SLI commercially known as Crossfire and now we have a picture of His Majesty the famous dongle and the board itself.

Even though Nvidia US thinks of me as ATI biased, the Canadian firm never showed me this system up and running while every other NDA journalist has seen it at least once, while most grovelly and bum sucking have seen it three times now.

Crossfire will be based on two chipsets - one Pentium 775 read powered with RD400 Northbridge and ATI's SB450 Southbridge. In Crossfire ATI cards works as dual 8X PCIe cards. This board is codenamed Stingray.

The second board is based on Athlon 64 / FX socket for AMD CPUs and using RD480 Northbridge and SB450 Southbridge with dual 8X PCIe cards.

Monsieur Le Dongle will connect to two DVI outs and should provide you with lossless quality, although your wallet will be lighter by a lossful quantity after you've lashed out the money for the stuff. Below, you can see the board, cards and dongle itself.

ATdongle.JPG


http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=23569
 
Yay, been waiting for this too happen, although I just bought a laptop and wouldn't spend that much for it. Now I'd like to know the performance of this against the Nvidia SLI's.
 
Brently said:
Why two PCIe 8x instead of one 16x card?

??????

cards don't even use up to x8 bandwidth yet, so 2 cards at x8 has the performance of two cards while one card at x16 will give you the performance of one card
 
I have a question Trotter, I am going to get a DFI LANPARTY UT nF4 ULTRA-D nForce4 Mobo for a system Im going to build...It supports SLI, however the video card... A Leadtek PX6800GT TDH Geforce 6800GT has a huge fan and heatsink, and I am told that two of those wont fit on that Mobo...I was referred to an Asus Mobo that fit two of those, but I wanted to ask is SLI worth switching Mobo's? Or should I keep the setup I already have? I just want to know this in case if it is worth it, then I can start off with it, instead of buying the Asus later down the road and then another of those 6800's...

Thanks
 
The second board is based on Athlon 64 / FX socket for AMD CPUs and using RD480 Northbridge

:confused:

I am confused. AMD doesnt use northbridges. I assume this wouldnt replace the memory controller, but rather acts as a high-speed hub for the vid cards.
 
No its not. However, you could also remove the heatsinks and put a smaller aftermarket cooler on them if u wanted to
 
KnowNothing said:
I have a question Trotter, I am going to get a DFI LANPARTY UT nF4 ULTRA-D nForce4 Mobo for a system Im going to build...It supports SLI, however the video card... A Leadtek PX6800GT TDH Geforce 6800GT has a huge fan and heatsink, and I am told that two of those wont fit on that Mobo...I was referred to an Asus Mobo that fit two of those, but I wanted to ask is SLI worth switching Mobo's? Or should I keep the setup I already have? I just want to know this in case if it is worth it, then I can start off with it, instead of buying the Asus later down the road and then another of those 6800's...

Thanks

If they dont fit, you can put Nvidia Silincers on them :)

Just dont buy Asus :mad:
 
From a couple of other articles posted on theinquirer.net it seems that to use Crossfire, you have to buy a Master Card (not the credit card). ATI has already said that they were going to do the Master Cards themselves (no other manufacturer).

Is SLI (or the ATI equivelent) worth it? Good question. It all boils down to two basic things:

1. Are you a serious, hard-core 3D gamer? These are the ones who gain the most benefit from SLI. Are you willing to spend this much for a special motherboard, two high-end video cards, and PSU that is up to task?

2. Can you even afford to drop this much change on this? Most of the hardware involved in this is way out of the "cheap" ballpark. Do you have the resources to do this?

In the end, the decision is yours. I know, for me, SLI (or ATI's version) would not be practical. I don't do first person shooters for the most part, but the games I do play work fine on the old BFG I have.
 
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