Crossfire vs SLI, Radeon Express 3200 Clash
Author: Luka Rakamaric
Date: 24 Mar 2006

NVIDIA SLI has been a thorn in ATI's eye for quite some time, and a little less than a year ago ATI released Crossfire, its own dual graphic card system. Although the marketing effect was substantial, the market penetration was minimal. Steam recently published a survey that more than 98 percent of its users using dual card configurations used SLI, and the rest used Crossfire. The reasons for this are not based on the performance of Crossfire over SLI, but rather the availability of the infamous Master cards, and the motherboard requirements. Contrary to NVIDIA?s nForce4 chipset, which is by far the most popular for the AMD platform, ATI?s chipsets that support Crossfire are simply not competitive. RD480 lost to NVIDIA nForce4 SLI chipset on all fronts, although the performance of the cards themselves was promising. All that is supposed to change with the arrival of the RD580, a new ATI Northbridge chip supporting Crossfire. We say Northbridge, and not chipset, because the two boards that we have here today both have ULi Southbridge chips. This could potentially be another problem for ATI?s manufacturers, as its SB600 is not exactly available for another few months. A couple of months ago NVIDIA bought ULi, and it would be really strange for it to continue to supply the competition with a superior product.
Nevertheless, we reviewed Crossfire performance on the two of the currently available RD580 boards. Both are R&D samples, so the performance shouldn?t be taken with much certainty. The first board is the one from DFI, another member of the famous LanParty series that is oriented to enthusiasts and overclockers. The RDX3200 looks almost identical to the nForce4 boards from the Lanparty series, the only difference being the existence of a passively cooled Southbridge, supplied by ULi.
The second board comes from Sapphire, and looks quite differently. It is not nearly as packed as DFI?s, however part of this impression is due to the white PCB, something not often seen with motherboards.
At this time we focused on CrossFire performance, and you can read a separate review of the DFI board here.