SLI for ATI

CSSource God

Anyone see this yet? Dual GPU's for current and next gen ati cards. Called rossfire. What yez think?? Good for me coz i can sell ATI cards really at good prices http://ati.com/

Mac daddy

hmmm interesting was planning a serious update this summer 2000 euro's+ the o'l 9800xt has served me well

CSSource God

Well how would 2 by x850xtpe's sound. I'll be doing it myself anyway. Ill let yez know when i get my hands on a few cards again..

DemonOfTheFall

I can't see this being trouble free.

The current generation of ATI Xpress200 motherboards have sucked absolute balls by most accounts I've read online.
A fair few previews of Crossfire have noted that ATIs boards are completely dodgy and missing a lot of features that Nforce boards have...

r00t69

DemonOfTheFall wrote:

I can't see this being trouble free.

The current generation of ATI Xpress200 motherboards have sucked absolute balls by most accounts I've read online.
A fair few previews of Crossfire have noted that ATIs boards are completely dodgy and missing a lot of features that Nforce boards have...

Well nVidia's SLI was fairly dodgy to start. They have had quiet a head start on ATI. Looking at the Computex 05 coverage ATI are showing off their R520 Chips and a little bit of Crossfire although apparently it is only working in 2D at the mo....so very usefull

Anyway I've just bought two 6800Ultra's so I gues I've chosen my side

4Xcut

According to a review on anandatech it should be possible to run Your two cards, adding one new one and uing one current one if you want, on any board that has two physical pci-E x16 slots. So if you could have the deadly nForce 4 chipset with your two X850s

astrofool

yea, there seems to be conflicting reports motherboard wise. Most seem to think the minimum needed is a new motherboard, and also a 'master' card.

Also, the rumours that any ATI card could work with any other seem to have been false, so next gen would mean two more new cards, rather than an upgrade of one at a time (though maybe they'll disable pipes to make this work?).

The nforce4 sli was always a very solid board, building from previous generations of nforce boards, the only thing dodgy was in the SLI drivers, which seems to be fairly sorted now. It is probably the best chipset ever made for a PC, performance/features wise. ATI however have a buggy southbridge, and are on their second generation of board, so will be going through alot of teething problems. I doubt ATI would be picky about letting their drivers run on VIA, Intel, or even nVidia boards, whereas nVidia have purposefully disabled SLI on non nVidia boards, when it could in fact run.

4Xcut

apperantly ATi partnered up with some other company, ULI i tjink it's called, in order to make good southbridges. Though they are pushing for their own at least they are providing some alternative

DemonOfTheFall

You cant use an Nforce 4 board.
It has to be an ATI Xpress 200 board, with 2 PCI-E x 8 slots.
You can use an existing X800 or X850 card with a special X800 or X850 master card. So its not just a case of using whatever card really.

Also, ATI are pushing all their partners to use their own crap southbridge rather than ULi's one.
Stupid move by them.

4Xcut

It discusses, in the last paragraph, about the possibilities of "mix 'n' match" in this review here