After recent news of NVIDIA launching their 4xSLI platform, ATI now announced the launch of the Crossfire Xpress 6400. With an Xpress 6400 motherboard you will be able to purchase two master cards and two slave cards from the X1000 series to power a single display with FOUR video cards. While this may not exactly be the making of a mainstream computer system, you can bet green team isn't happy about it.

As you may have guessed by the naming convention, this product is basically an Xpress 3200 x 2. There are a total of 4 (count them!) PCIex16 slots. We know that ATI plans to allow some high-end video cards to enter Crossfire mode without use of the dongle on the Xpress 3200 with an upcoming driver release, but we are unsure at this point whether we will see 4x dongle-free Crossfire. I think it's doable, but we'll surely find out more details in the near future. While the embargo is lifting today, there is no word yet on when these motherboard will become available. However, my guess is that they will become available on the 31st of this month.