After quite a bit of delay, we got to play with ATI’s CrossFire kit in the second half of September. And about a month later, we finally have a retail motherboard based on the ATI Radeon Xpress 200 CrossFire Edition chipset from none other than DFI- a company that made a good name in the enthusiast community with their nForce3 and nForce4 chipset based boards. Let’s find out how well they’ve implemented their ATI solution on their LANParty UT RDX200 CF-DR.

Packaging

DFI places the RDX200 in their LAN Party UT series which is their better than average packaging but not the best. We liked the box which is red in color and lists some of the features and specifications on the back.

Inside the box, we see the standard DFI rounded yellow IDE cables as well as yellow SATA cables which certainly look pretty good. You’re also provided the add-on audio module about which we’ll talk in the features section while a drivers CD and an installation manual along with a Quick start guide.

Layout

The Layout of the RDX200 is slightly different than most boards that hit our labs. For one, the position on the memory sockets and MOSFETs has been swapped and as you can see, the memory modules now reside to the left of the CPU socket while DFI places the MOSFETs to the right along with the main power connector and an eight pin additional power connector. Don’t worry if you only have a four pin 12V connector as that’ll fit and work just fine- we used that for testing the board as well.

DFI also places the IDE connectors in this area along with the floppy connector that’s bent ninety degrees. Right after the floppy connector, you have four SATA connectors powered by the Southbridge while four additional SATA ports powered by the Silicon Image 3114 controller supporting 3.0Gb/s speed are placed towards the bottom of the board. Between these two set of SATA ports, DFI places the reset/power switches as well as the clearing CMOS jumper making it very accessible even after you’ve fitted all your other components.

There are a total of six expansion slots on the RDX200 out of which three are PCI-Express and two of them can be used in a CrossFire configuration. There are no jumpers or flip cards to select single or dual video configurations and instead DFI simply puts it as an option in the BIOS making things easy. We also like the spacing that DFI has put between the two PCI-E x16 slots- even two dual slot graphics cards are reasonably spaced apart. The remaining three 32-bit PCI slots should be plenty for your expansion needs as almost all of the usually-used features are onboard.