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ATI Crossfire Xpress 3200 (RD580) Technology Preview
Introduction
When ATI brought their Xpress 200 Crossfire (RD480) chipset to the motherboard market, they were a bit late to the game. As you may know, the Xpress 200 chipset itself has been around since the end of 2004, but the Crossfire version didn't come until just a few months ago, at the end of November, 2005. When we finally saw the Crossfire parts become available for purchase, it was clear that ATI had some serious catching up to do. With so many people already swearing by NVIDIA's competing solutions, ATI really needed to pull out all the stops. While Crossfire proved to be competitive with SLI, it certainly didn't blow it out of the water. On the NVIDIA side of things, we've seen some manufacturers transitioning to dual x16 PCIe parts. Previously, you would get x16 with a single card, but two x8 when running SLI. The move to dual x16, however, did not result in any clear performance benefits. So, at the end of the day, dual x16 has become nothing more than a marketing tool for NVIDIA to claim dominance over the competition. Until today, that is. One week ago (Feb 22, 2006), I was in San Francisco along with fellow members of the press for ATI's RD580 Technology Day. The day was spent listening to a handful of people from ATI tell us all about RD580, what went into the design, what makes it better than the competition, and so on. Today we will be talking about ATI's Crossfire Xpress 3200 (RD580) chipset. In the most basic terms, it's a dual x16 solution - but it's much more than RD480 with dual x16 PCIe. RD580 was designed from the ground up and promises to bring real performance benefits through the use of "true" dual x16 PCIe slots. ATI is also boasting superior overclockability, in terms of both headroom and tweakability. As of today, March 1, at 8am CST, you should be able to purchase motherboards using ATI's new chipset. The first board partner to have product available will be ASUS with their A8R32-MVP Deluxe, to be followed by products from Sapphire, DFI, ABIT, and PCPartner in the weeks to come. Unfortunately, due to a mix-up in shipping, we don't have an A8R32-MVP Deluxe on-site for performance testing at this time. That said, we wouldn't have had the time necessary to really put the motherboard to test anyways, so rather than giving hard performance testing results, we will be discussing the technology behind ATI's Crossfire Xpress 3200 and what we expect to find when we do get to test the performance. In the near future you can look forward to some head-to-head performance comparisons between leading dual x16 solutions as we investigate ATI's claims, but for now let's talk about the technology behind the product.
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Add Comment
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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