Crossfire vs NF4

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EQTakeOffense

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Sep 12, 2002
Messages
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I have a dilemma.

I want Crossfire 1900XT but, there are no boards out there that really appeal to me. I want to do some overclocking (300+ FSB at least).

Are there any really good Crossfire boards out there that are on the level of the DFI Expert or Asus A8N-SLI?
 
There's 4 AMD crossfire motherboards and 1 Intel crossfire motherboard.. I don't know if they are good as ASUS A8N32-SLI or DFI Expert. I think DFI Lanparty UT RDX200 Crossfire is at least better crossfire out there.
 
There's 4 AMD crossfire motherboards..
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That's really a shame now that the 1900XT is out....

I keep hearing that there's going to be a new ATI Chipset out, R580? Is that true?
 
Yeah I totally agree.. I think they should have at least 10 or more crossfire motherboards by now. Crossfire was first introduced in October 2005.. :rolleyes: I dont know if its true that ATI R580 chipset will release soon.. It's a rumor that I've been hearing for months all over on the internet..
 
supposedly the 580 chipset got pushed back until mid febuary. I also want to do x1900 crosfire but for the time being im building on a dfi ulta-d and will just resell it once the 580 matures near late summer ( 2 or 3 bios releases etc) will also give me the time to decide if the dx10 cards in their infancy will be worth it vs buying the second x1900. Im useally slow to jump on a new operating system because of bugs/driver support/ games actually taking advantage of the added features etc. so it may be worth not going to windows vista until late 2k7 for me.
 
I'd wait for the R580's because they are supposed to be much better than the current crop.
 
supposedly the 580 chipset got pushed back until mid febuary
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I'm going to wait until the 580's come out then to see what it has to offer. I'm going to start my build after school ends which is around late April early May so I'm in no rush to buy. I'm just trying to see what technology is out there for now so I can start deciding which platforms I want to go with. The only thing I'm working on now is my case CM 830 on the way ;p
 
EQTakeOffense said:
That's really a shame now that the 1900XT is out....

I keep hearing that there's going to be a new ATI Chipset out, R580? Is that true?
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Uhm, the X1900XT and X1900XTX are the R580 "core". I think the CrossFire motherboard chipset must use a different code name.
 
The RD580 chipset (whether crossfire enabled or not I dont know) was originally slated to be released with the X1900. As with most new chipsets though somet went arrey and they decided to push it back. There is no diffinitive date on the release as of yet but the last I heard they are still looking to release it within Q1 possibly very early Q2 at latest.
If you need something right now there is an R480 chipset out that seems to do pretty well as well as the RD200. But according to what has been "said" the RD580 is supposedly going to blow SLi out of the water with any crossfire enabled cards

Hope that helps

Greg
 
gregnash said:
If you need something right now there is an R480 chipset out that seems to do pretty well as well as the RD200. But according to what has been "said" the RD580 is supposedly going to blow SLi out of the water with any crossfire enabled cards

Hope that helps

Greg
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I'm certain that it will be a good chipset, as the RD200 shows a lot of promise in Overclocking. The blowing SLI out of the water comment does need a rebutal in the fact that the nForce4 SLI, RD200 and the RD580 chipsets only do "one thing" when it comes to multi-GPU cards.

The "one thing" is to provide multiple PCI-E graphics slots (PEG) for the graphics cards use, there is not any extra "magic" beyond this capability. This is why the Intel 975 chipset can also do "CrossFire", not because ATI helped to design it as rumoured, but because of the multiple PEG slots support. nVIDIA could also do SLI with this chipset using older drivers, but based on the decision to not license the chipset, do not allow SLI with their latest drivers.

That said, it's only the drivers that enable SLI or CrossFire (along with the external dongle or internal bridge card depending on the system chosen) and nothing else.

So with that out of the way, I would expect the RD580 to yield similar crossfire results as the RD200. After all, in real world tests availble today, the nForce4 SLI X16 chipset with SLI is only single digit precentage points above SLI with the nForce4 SLI chipset (the only difference being x8 channels to each PEG in SLI and full x16 channels to each PEG with the SLI X16).

The only way we'll see any difference is when graphics cards are developed that truely need the full x16 channels to perform at their peek, even the X1900XTX doesn't approach this need at this time (not that it isn't a spectacular card, I'm not dissing it here folks).

So to truely compare, in the future, we'll need to compare CrossFire RD580 with a future card setup with the nForce4 SLI X16 and a future card setup.
 
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