Crossfire motherboard roundup - 975X vs RD580!
Author: Vedran Dakic
Date: 10 Jun 2006

Today we'd like to take a look at nVIDIA rival's gamers' solution - Crossfire. Although SLI has been around the block for a long time now (does anyone remember the first Voodoo cards?), ATi has managed to put a decent comparable system to compete on the ultimate market - gamers. In the past year, Crossfire has gone through quite an evolution - from a product with too many hickups and unknown variables to a complete solution. Not too long ago, Intel came in this equation with his own chipsets. We managed to get three ATI's RD580 motherboards (two with ULi's M1575 SouthBridge and one with ATi's SB450) and three Intel 975X-based motherboards. How do they compare in search for the ultimate Crossfire performance?A couple of words about our test setup. We used the following pieces of hardware:

- AMD Athlon 64 FX60, 2.6GHz, 2x1 MB cache
- Intel Pentium Extreme Edition 955 3.46 GHz, 2x2MB cache
- OCZ Platinum Rev.2 2x512MB at 2-2-2-5 timings
- OCZ Platinum Edition XTC PC2-6400 at 4-4-4-12 timings
- OCZ GameXStream 700W
- Sapphire X1900XT Crossfire Edition 512MB
- Club3D X1900XTX 512MB
- Western Digital Raptor 36GB
- NEC ND-3500 DVD+/-RW optical drive

The motherboards used for this test are:

- MSI 975X Platinum
- Gigabyte GA-1975X
- Foxconn 975X7AA
- DFI LanParty UT CFX3200-DR
- ASUS A8R32-MVP Deluxe

We won't get into detailed specs about these products (you can click on the motherboard name to find out everything you know about these motherboards), but we should consider some suggestions and issues we had with these products before get onto their performance.