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ATI Crossfire Xpress 3200 (RD580) Technology Preview

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Kurtis Kronk
Brian
ATI
Mar. 1, 2006

Specifications

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Closing Thoughts

Without actually having a board on-hand for testing, it's impossible to absolutely distinguish between what is reality and what is just marketing. And even if we had received a motherboard last week, we wouldn't have had enough time to properly test it against competing boards to come to any conclusive statements. However, based on our analysis of the technology, it does seem that ATI's claims regarding performance could hold true, to some degree, in the mid-range and low-end segments (without a connector).

For me, the big question remains exactly how much of a difference is there? And is there any difference between the solutions in these segments when there IS a connector between the two cards? What about for the high-end? I can understand ATI wanting to use a weakness of NVIDIA's solution to their advantage, after all, NVIDIA takes every opportunity that presents itself to step on ATI - I just wonder how much this weakness really matters in the grand scheme of things. How many people are actually trying to run mid-range cards in SLI without a connector? And why would they do that, when better performance is just an SLI bridge away? In the low-end sector, I am curious as to how many people actually purchase two low-end cards. I would imagine most people who are interested in SLI and drop over $100 on an nForce4 SLI motherboard, would also want to buy a decent video card.

EDIT: When this article was posted, I was unsure what South Bridge the ASUS A8R32-MVP used. Based on the specifications I was given of the board (which did not say anything about SATA II support) I could only guess that it used the SB450. It has come to my attention, however, that the ASUS board actually employs the ULi M1575 South Bridge, which does include support for SATA II and NCQ and doesn't suffer from the poor USB performance of the SB450. I still don't know for sure what South Bridge the other motherboard manufacturers will be implementing (though it seems most are leaning towards the ULi), so we'll see how that goes.

Overclocking is always a great thing for the enthusiast market, and we look forward to pushing this board to its limits and comparing our overclocking results with that of the competition. In the weeks to come, we'll be getting our hands on some dual X16 boards and put them through their paces. We will test and compare dual x8 and dual x16 solutions from both NVIDIA and ATI and find out what performance benefits we can realistically expect from either solution.

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Page 4 of 4

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Page 1: Introduction
Page 2: Inside RD580
Page 3: Q&A Session
Page 4: Closing Thoughts

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2 User Comments

1 - Posted by Kurtis on March 8, 2006 - 6:39 am

I just noticed this article over at PCPerspective. Ryan investigates ATI's claims about bandwidth bottlenecks on NVIDIA's SLIx16 boards and comes to the conclusion that these claims were not based in fact. Have a look:
http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=212&type=expe...

2 - Posted by Frosty on March 8, 2006 - 5:24 pm

i knew it those bastards lied!

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