ATI Backs Up CrossFire Quality @ [H]

FrgMstr

FrgMstr

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ATI Backs Up CrossFire Quality : ATI is striving to make the future of CrossFire motherboards that much brighter and we think you be better off to buy ATI Certified motherboards if you have the opportunity to do so.

The Bottom Line

While my opinion on this might change in the future, I think that, at this juncture, an informed enthusiast looking to purchase a CrossFire motherboard solution would be best off starting at ATI’s own Certified pages. Sadly, there are no CrossFire motherboards on those pages yet. And while I may not be the world’s largest Radeon Xpress 200 fan, I still have a lot of faith in ATI. I truly hope that HardOCP is publishing glowing CrossFire motherboard reviews and system evaluations here soon.
 
Wow, now thats alotta insight! :eek:

I'm gonna go meditate on this for awhile.

(Nice read, thumbs are up!)
 
Good read Kyle. Maybe this will silence some of the red fan boys that think you're all about dissing ATI.

Way to set the record straight, and thanks for letting us know what is going on behind the scenes.

-Matt
 
watching and waiting. NF4 is what keeps me from buying an ATi card. I want the ability to do dual-video cards at some point, but I will NOT buy a crossfire setup till it is mature and stable... that leaves me with Nvidia only.
 
Kyle - Any ETA when more crossfire motherboards are supposed to hit the market (I'm a big Asus/abit/msi fan and rather buy from them)

Even if they say...2 weeks you should see more.
 
lopoetve said:
watching and waiting. NF4 is what keeps me from buying an ATi card. I want the ability to do dual-video cards at some point, but I will NOT buy a crossfire setup till it is mature and stable... that leaves me with Nvidia only.
Click to expand...

Kind of my thing. I have an x1800xt card..I can return it...I want to give them a chance.
I'm tempted to buy just a single slot pci-e (cheap) motherboard and maybe upgrade later if it's worth it.

I dunno.
 
Netrat33 said:
Kyle - Any ETA when more crossfire motherboards are supposed to hit the market (I'm a big Asus/abit/msi fan and rather buy from them)

Even if they say...2 weeks you should see more.
Click to expand...

I have been told 2 weeks by some, 1 month + by others. I really don't know, but it seems that ATI have not "certified" one single motherboard yet, so I would not buy any of them right out of the gate.
 
Kyle if it sucks it sucks, why are you holding ATi's hand? Is ATI pushing you around due to the reviews of the ATI based Falcon NW machine?

Oh, and kudos for taking an active part in your forums; I think it's awesome that we can converse with the [H]ardest dude.
 
A fine article. ATi's current state is severely unfortunate for consumers, and it's important for people like Kyle to "hold their hand" and walk them through what they need to accomplish.

There's no corporate allegience here. There HAS to be solid competition for this market to thrive and so that consumers don't get prodded by obscene prices. We're seeing SLi X16 boards at $250 a pop solely because CrossFire doesn't pose any real threat.

I don't want to pay $250 for a damn motherboard.
 
gigatexal said:
Kyle if it sucks it sucks, why are you holding ATi's hand? Is ATI pushing you around due to the reviews of the ATI based Falcon NW machine?

Oh, and kudos for taking an active part in your forums; I think it's awesome that we can converse with the [H]ardest dude.
Click to expand...


It has sucked, and I have never said differently. I am not holding anyone's hand, simply letting my readers know what has transpired and my thoughts on the situation. And as for pushing me around, the only way that will happen is if their PR guys get me really drunk and happen to have a wheel barrow handy. ;)
 
Kyle this is one of the most fair and objective articles I think you have ever written. Very nicely done. I bought the board last week and have also been having this reboot issue. Another issue that I have had arise is harddrive performance. For some reason the SB450 performs horribly when using a Seagate Barracuda V drive. Switching over to the sil3114 fixes the problem.

Also, DFI fails to include any regular windows xp drivers for the 3114, only raid. You have to download them from silicon image directly.

Besides these issues, overall performance of the board has been quite good.
 
Very well written with lots of good points.

My question to you Kyle is this:

"At what point could we, the enthusiast crowd, consider Crossfire a viable platform for us to pursue?"

By this I mean, when will we see the motherboards hit shelves as well as the Master cards that were promised to make this work. As it stands now, I still say that anyone looking to go Dual GPU will have no choice but to move towards SLI for its wide availability and proven performance.
 
Bona Fide said:
Did the original nForce chipset have any trouble like this?
Click to expand...

I think the initial SLI boards did have some minor issues from what I recall but most of it was resolved rather quickly.
 
Bona Fide said:
Did the original nForce chipset have any trouble like this?
Click to expand...
I sold a ton of nForce based systems back in the day, and I keep contact with one customer in particular who has a nearly 4 year old PC of mine running an nForce chipset...I don't remember any issues like this.
 
gostriker said:
read like yet another anti ati piece to me. but what do i know. ;)
Click to expand...
There is no anti anything, only what the consumer needs to know.

Wouldn't it be a better world for all of us if everyone delivered an outstanding product the first time around? I mean, I would surmise that there'd be a lot more advertising dollars to go around, too...
 
honestly i feel like ati has a chance but its a tad late. i mean i understand crossfire is an alternative to sli however sli has been around for a year and a half? i just think ati is digging themselves a hole especially in the pricing department.
 
Sounds like a good way for nvidia to steal the motherboard business from them easy :D
I know they wont though.

I might get an sli board anyway...sure someone will figure a way.

Oh decisions decisions.

Any chance of seeing an crossfire review anyway...see if it's worth the wait?
 
Morley said:
There is no anti anything, only what the consumer needs to know.

Wouldn't it be a better world for all of us if everyone delivered an outstanding product the first time around? I mean, I would surmise that there'd be a lot more advertising dollars to go around, too...
Click to expand...

Yea sounded consumer friendly and professional. (Almost broke down and bought a DFI board for the first time...but definately feel I should wait still on this particular crossfire board)

I liked how the article said how ati is very strict on the "Certified by ATI" and they realize they are under a lot of pressure.
 
I have now used two ATI 200 Express boards in systems and both have been plagued with problems of some sort. The first was MSI's 939 Micro ATX offering which worked great until I attempted to pair it with an nVidia graphics card, then total game instability came into play similar to what Kyle found while reviewing the box from Falcon. Now I have made the mistake of purchasing another 200 Express board of the Intel Socket 775 flavor. Once again it is a micro atx, but this one has a ULI southbridge and was made by Asus. This board is totally unstable for any video application using the onboard video. 2 boards with 2 different sockets from 2 manufacturers with instability issues? I love ATI cards, I use an X850 XT in my main system, but this chipset needs work. Unfortunately this last board was for a neighbor's upgrade, now he has no PC and I am stuck troubleshooting a problem product on my own time.
 
As I read the article, I had an interesting thought. I see great similarities between ATi vs nVidia battle and the AMD vs. Intel battle. When AMD released dual-core processors, Intel got caught with a serious case of pants-around-the-ankles. The X2 processors were fast, (relatively) cool, and worked in almost all Socket 939 boards. Intel had to respond, and did so by hurriedly kludging together two processor cores into one package. The Pentium 8x0 processors, while admirable, just aren't up to the standards that the Athlon64/Opteron x2 processors have set. Not yet, at least. I expect (and hope, for competition's sake) that this will change.

It seems like a very similar thing happened with nVidia and ATi. nVidia caught ATi with its pants down when they released SLI. In order to save face, ATi had to respond, and engineered a similar concept in Crossfire. From what I've seen (admittedly not much), ATi has suffered as a result of the frenzy to develop their own dual-card solution. In this case, a not-as-elegant solution and huge supply problems. I expect (and hope, for competition's sake) that this will change. Hopefully soon. We all benefit when ATi and nVidia are duking it out.

 
Ingonuts13 said:
I think the initial SLI boards did have some minor issues from what I recall but most of it was resolved rather quickly.
Click to expand...

The original nForce 4 SLI boards were FULL of problems. I had one of the 1st Asus A8N SLI Deluxe boards and after 8 bios releases in the first 2 months I gave up on it. I remember if you so much as sneezed wrong you wouldn't have any video signal. It also required a CMOS clear any time it went Schizo.

nForce 4 is now a great product, but is wasn't a honeymoon, that is for sure. I lived it.
 
I have been using the Asus P5RD1-V which uses the Xpress 200 chipset and I have had no problems with it at all. Its been totally stable. I'm even using a nVidia card on it. :D
 
Mohonri said:
As I read the article, I had an interesting thought. I see great similarities between ATi vs nVidia battle and the AMD vs. Intel battle. When AMD released dual-core processors, Intel got caught with a serious case of pants-around-the-ankles. The X2 processors were fast, (relatively) cool, and worked in almost all Socket 939 boards. Intel had to respond, and did so by hurriedly kludging together two processor cores into one package. The Pentium 8x0 processors, while admirable, just aren't up to the standards that the Athlon64/Opteron x2 processors have set. Not yet, at least. I expect (and hope, for competition's sake) that this will change.

It seems like a very similar thing happened with nVidia and ATi. nVidia caught ATi with its pants down when they released SLI. In order to save face, ATi had to respond, and engineered a similar concept in Crossfire. From what I've seen (admittedly not much), ATi has suffered as a result of the frenzy to develop their own dual-card solution. In this case, a not-as-elegant solution and huge supply problems. I expect (and hope, for competition's sake) that this will change. Hopefully soon. We all benefit when ATi and nVidia are duking it out.

Click to expand...

Ummm, ATi has had a dual card solution since 1998 that they sold to goverments, hell from my understandings it can easally scale to 16 cards no problem, also crossfire(video portion) does NOT need a crossfire chipset, crossfire is totally independent of the motherboard, Intel motherboards already un-offically support crossfire in their non-ati chipset motherboards, (it does however need a bit of editing of how the bios handle the PCI-eXpress links, this small bios changes does not break sli in the intel boards so if nVidia wanted to add crossfire support they could without breaking SLi, I doubt nVidia will enable crossfire support on their mb's thou :p) while your right on most cases thing is ATi's problem is a motherboard chipset NOT the Dual Card solution which is better (gives more of a pref bonus, closer to 100%, while SLi is closer to 50% improvement) Just wanna make sure no one mistakes your info for truth :), you do have a goo point thou about the pants down, I agree on that fact, and I also agree that the dual card solution was rushed (look at 1600x1200 limit on old x850 crossfire) but the technology behind it, ATi has been using it for a while(with goverment and military simulations) and has had lots of time to perfect it, but the CONSUMER verson was rushed but while it was rushed, the x1800 and up have gotten rid of the bugs that the rushed x850s had (namely the 1600x1200 limit)

Chilly
 
put it this way ati is gonna try to prevent any problems however it is inevitable. nf4 chip drivers are finally getting good i have a stable computer and i think people are ulitmaltely looking for that.
 
gostriker said:
read like yet another anti ati piece to me. but what do i know. ;)
Click to expand...
I dont know... he says they're not doing good, but he does go and say "i hope they go bankrupt because of this"
Personally I think this artical has a "I know you're down, but you can do it" undertone.
 
Considering one of these boards and going to an amd setup, something i hate doing because i know amd's new socket is due out in a few months which means another change of equipment after they stop making chips for the 939 format. :(
 
Morley said:
There is no anti anything, only what the consumer needs to know.

Wouldn't it be a better world for all of us if everyone delivered an outstanding product the first time around? I mean, I would surmise that there'd be a lot more advertising dollars to go around, too...
Click to expand...
"No anti anything" ... that does not make sense. A large amount of what passes for reviews on hardware sites (not talking about one site in particular) are really anti-xxxxx rants based on poor information, poor testing, inexperience and immaturity. Those reviews are irresponsible and tend to skew public opinion in the wrong direction.

I thought the article was much better than previous ones in terms of being anti-ATI. For a long time [H] was obviously very pro-ATI and anti-NVidia. Now they have switched around. It is easy to tell when there is a bias because you see a lot of personal opinions (rather than reviews), attacks on the company, posting of internal emails etc.

So I say thumbs up to [H] for a more balanced article free of personal attacks or retoric.

What most people fail to give consideration of is that motherboards, chipsets, CPUs and GPUs are very difficult to design. You are taking the work of a large number of people and companies with varying skill levels and trying to get it to all work as a unit. If even one person fails then everything falls apart.

A good example is the delay on the R520 (X1800) GPU. Apparently there was an extra logic gate possibly inserted as part of a 3rd party library that caused months of delay. While the delay was going on many hardware sites were filled with rants about what a lousy company ATI was and how NVidia was now king again. All BS possibly designed to get people to visit their site or maybe just a example of immaturity. Either way not worth reading except for the entertainment factor.

It could be that ATI's chipset requires a very well designed motherboard and is not forgiving to poor designs or poor sub-components. Maybe the chipset could be improved to be more forgiving and to work with lower quality components. However, that does not mean that the ATI design is flawed.

Intel seems to do a very good job of making quality chipsets that work in a wide variety of motherboards from the inexpensive brands on up. But if you buy a cheap Intel based board and put the wrong brand of memory in it then you will have major problems. On the other hand if you buy a better motherboard you can get away with cheap memory. I have had first hand experience with that exact problem.

So for all the ranting and anti-xxxxx people out there who are complaining about motherboards they have or have not purchased ... I say stop reacting to the hype and stop spreading the hype.
 
I think it wil be a better chipset than nvidias. It just needs some good software to bring it out.
 
tomv said:
It could be that ATI's chipset requires a very well designed motherboard and is not forgiving to poor designs or poor sub-components. Maybe the chipset could be improved to be more forgiving and to work with lower quality components. However, that does not mean that the ATI design is flawed.

I
Click to expand...

Not sure that any company designs their chipsets to work with shitty components. The reality is that DFI jsut rushed their product probably for name brand recognition on "first to market". The fact that as of right now the board is not ATI certified is just plain funny.
 
jdracer47 said:
The original nForce 4 SLI boards were FULL of problems. I had one of the 1st Asus A8N SLI Deluxe boards and after 8 bios releases in the first 2 months I gave up on it. I remember if you so much as sneezed wrong you wouldn't have any video signal. It also required a CMOS clear any time it went Schizo.

nForce 4 is now a great product, but is wasn't a honeymoon, that is for sure. I lived it.
Click to expand...

Yeah I bought a ASUS A8N SLi Deluxe too when it was launched, horrible board, caused massive HDD corruption, RMA'ed multiple times, but what can you do if the board is just designed poorly. Multiple HDDs, multiple brands of RAM, multiple Power Supplies, I can't believe how much time and money I spent trying to get that board to work. I for one will never buy a nVidia chipset board again (I've used every generation of nForce, NF1, 2, 3, & 4, and the only ones that are good are the ones that are nothing more than clockspeed bumps over the previous generation like NF2 was to NF1 (but if you had the NF1, you had to live through it's teething problems).
 
Ingonuts13 said:
Not sure that any company designs their chipsets to work with shitty components.
Click to expand...
That statement is meaningless. Any component (chipset or other) can be designed with tight tolerances or more forgiving tolerances: load capability, voltage range, resistance to noise, timing issues, input/output impedance etc. A general design goal would be to produce a component that is as robust as possible given the constraints of design and manufacturing cost. The ATI chipset may be less forgiving in that sense.
 
I want to see better onboard sound on the 200 dollar mobos that's my biggest gripe. DFI is small and was a low quality mobo maker and it seems to hold true today as well. Thanks for the update on ATI.
 
.::MAGE::. said:
I want to see better onboard sound on the 200 dollar mobos that's my biggest gripe. DFI is small and was a low quality mobo maker and it seems to hold true today as well. Thanks for the update on ATI.
Click to expand...


DFI's low quality???? i beg to differ. Yes their previous products are inferior, but their LAN party series and especially their Ultra-D and SLI-DR NF4 boards are considered the best PERIOD...in fact, if you know something about the components used on the Ultra-D and SLI-DR, they are much better designed than average motherboards. I believe ASUS just recently designed a board with 8 phase power regulation circuit(which is awesome by the way), other than that, ASUS's power circuitry design and compoenent choices are just above average.


Oh, back to the ATI cross fire thing.

1. the external "dongle" connection for the cards kills half the available DVI connectors.
so on the Nvidia SLI computer you have the option to run 4 DVI driven LCDs and on ATI, max 2, if they support it. This problem will be worse later when we need 4 or 8 GPUs, then ATI's solution would need to be daisy chained....leaving only 2 connectors for monitor connection.

2. 1600x1200 max resolution on crossfire....i hope this is a software fix. If it's in the hardware design for max 1600, then they will GET SCREWED, because nobody pays 800+ bux for a platform(mobo + 2 X1000 series cards) want to play at 1600 max

3. chipsets takes generations to matural as manufactures(ATI in this case) learn from their previous mistakes in design. Look at Nvidia.....Their NForce 1 was average. NF2 was the bomb for AthlonXP . NF3 was average for A64, and NF4 kicked butt. I think ATI's next gen chipset will be mature enough for production use. NOT THIS GEN...they messed up this gen. PERIOD.

4. Reliance on ULI south bridge is another mistake. For performance reasons, the south bridge functions would be integrated into the north bridge for one chip design. (like the NF3 and NF4).. Relying on a third party supply of south bridge is horrible.
 
siliconnerd said:
It looks like the ECS PA1 MVP Extreme is listed as being certified.

Also, would you mind expanding on the PCB supply problems? Is it a general backlog at the PCB manufactures? Will be be seeing any shortages on production motherboards because of this?
Click to expand...

Which power user/enthusiast in their right mind would plug 800 dollars worth of X1800 series crossfire cards into an ECS board???? Gosh, we need an Abit/Asus/Iwill/DFI/MSI board first before ECS/biostar/Jetway board

in terms of pure engineering skillz, I like the following mobo companies(and their associated engineering marvels)

Abit- BP6, KT7
DFI - NF4 Ultra-D and SLI-DR
IWILL - MPX2, and ZMaxdp, ZMaxd2 SFF

then again, the person responsible for designing the BP6 is the same one designing the NF4Ultra-D and SLI-DR. So I expect great boards coming out of DFI.

****somebody design a board to hook Dual Dual-Core Athlon64s together in dual socket939 with SLI will get my hard earned greens!
 
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