Crossfire

TerrorFirmer

I got a new mobo today for my old computer and surprisingly I discovered upon opening that is has 2 16x PCI-E slots. It's not advertised on the box at all, for some reason...only after looking afterwards it says on the back in small print something about 2 16x lanes for ultimate gaming...right underneath the part where is says 'superfast usb2.0'....great marketing there at ECS :rolleyes:

Anywho, is crossfire worth it with an x1800xt? Do I need a crossfire edition card and then just my regular x1800xt or can they both be regular cards etc? OR would it be better to just stick with a single one and change it out eventually for something dx10.

thanks.

Mslug

Personally I\'m not too keen on the 160% performance for 200% the price you get with SLI/crossfire so I would stick with one card till a reasonable dx10 come along.

I\'m not too up on radeon cards but for crossfire there should but a piece pf copper connector of the outside of the edge of the card facing out.

Endurance Man

One of the cards has to be the crossfire mastercard, the board has to support crossfire, and you need this big ass cable to connect the two cards.

8T8

Yup you need the X1800 master card which is a rare bird, just not worth it in fact I wouldn't be surprised if Crossfire X1950 Pro's would beat the X1800XT.

But even with the cheapest X1950Pro at €135 two of them still approach the cost of a single 8800GTS 320 which will easily trounch the Crossfire setup so in the end not worth it unless you can get the X1950 Pro's super cheap.

X1950Pro's, X1650XT's both use the latest gen crossfire which does not need a master card anymore it uses an SLI like bridge between the two cards, all of the Radeon HD 2000 series now use this and the prior X1k cards are the only ones from that line that do as well.

TerrorFirmer

Ah thats cool. I wasn't sure if the x1800xt was part of that whole master card thing. As you said unless I got something else mega cheap no point going the crossfire route. One thing though. My board doesn't officially support either sli or crossfire, but apparently it will work with hacked sli drivers, anyone got more info on these?

Also, I've read that crossfire doesn't work on p965 because of the lack of peer to peer write, so how come crossfire now apparently works with newer ati drivers if it was a board limitation rather then a driver one? That one i'm not too clear on so I'd be weary of even trying crossfire since I can't find any definite answers anywhere....

its a p965t-a mobo, with 2 16x slots so 1 at 16x and 1 at 4x if you have 2 cards.

8T8

Crossfire is supported on Intel 965/975/P35/X38 chipsets and any ATI/AMD chipset that has two PCI-e x16 slots even if one is electrically x4.

Not sure about the peer to peer stuff you mention never heard of that before. Maybe it was in reference to the soft crossfire which is the X1600/X1300 cards which can run in crossfire over the PCI-e bus but as far as I know that is working on boards without dual x8/x16 slots.

SLI only works on NVIDIA SLI motherboards though the forthcoming Intel X38 chipset will supposedly support SLI as there is some sort of NVIDIA southbridge chip integrated into the board according to rumors that way NVIDIA cleverly avoids opening up chipset support.

There were some hacked SLI drivers out there but given SLI's heavy reliance on driver updates it is not practical and the hacked drivers out there last I heard are pretty ancient as VIA/ULI were the only ones doing the actual hacking but ULI was bought by NVIDIA and VIA is all but dead and buried in the motherboard business.

TerrorFirmer

Hmmm, thanks for the info 8t8. Guess I'll just have to stick with what I have and go the 8800 route if necessary. Just not as cool as having crossfire or sli though is it...:D