We’ve already looked at the technology offered by ATI’s Crossfire platform in our preview quite some time back. Its unfortunate that ATI couldn’t get CrossFire out sooner as nVidia has already released their next generation 7800GT/GTX cards and thus what we have today- the X850XT cards in CrossFire configuration competing with nVidia’s previous generation 6800 series in SLI mode.

The kit that ATI sent us was made up of the CrossFire motherboard and two X850XT cards one of which is a master card- something required for Crossfire to work. We used our standard X2-4800 CPU with 2 x 512MB Corsair modules at SPD settings to get as close of a match as our general testbed which is made up of DFI’s nForce4 SLI motherboard- one that doesn’t support Crossfire configuration.

Setting up Crossfire is quite simple- the master card needs to go into the primary PCI-E x16 slot and a cable runs from the master to the standard card which in turn connects to your monitor. There are no switches or bridges and you don’t need to reboot to enable or disable multi GPU mode.

We had very limited time with the setup as the GITEX show is going on in Dubai and ATI needed to demonstrate the CrossFire technology at as many places it could. Thus we only have the graphics cards performance measures and didnt have any time to look into the motherboard testing. Lets get straight into the numbers by intorducing the testbed.