http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=ODg4
Although this is a motherboard article, I feel it has a place here in video because you have to run Crossfire video cards on a Crossfire motherboard. (so it's a multi part solution, two video cards, Crossfire motherboard) Also, people considering Crossfire are probably mainly thinking about the video cards, as we usually assume a motherboard is just going to work.
Not so with Crossfire.
Defective motherboard? No-
If I had just spent $199! on one of these stinkers, I would go ballistic!
When SLI came out, people were fond of posting it's trivial issues like "doesn't work with Apple monitor", "doesn't support WS yet", "doesn't work in ancient Windows 2000".
Compare that with "Gee my whole computer won't boot".
I think it's pretty obvious ATI should not have entered this arena at this point in time- Crossfire has been a tale of woe all year, late, limited and malfunctioning at all levels.
Although this is a motherboard article, I feel it has a place here in video because you have to run Crossfire video cards on a Crossfire motherboard. (so it's a multi part solution, two video cards, Crossfire motherboard) Also, people considering Crossfire are probably mainly thinking about the video cards, as we usually assume a motherboard is just going to work.
Not so with Crossfire.
I took delivery of our DFI CrossFire motherboard and prepped it for testing. We almost immediately ran into problems. The first thing I noticed was that I could not save my BIOS settings, exit the BIOS, and then reboot. After attempting to save and leave the BIOS, the motherboard would freeze at a blank screen. Resetting the board would allow a reboot, but that did not always work; sometimes a hard power down was needed. The reboot issues did not stop there. Even once we got an OS installed, the motherboard still exhibited reboot issues where it would hang on POST. Sometimes it would hang at IDE detection, sometimes at Silicon Image RAID controller detection, and sometimes it would hang after setting the interrupt channels. Then again, sometimes it would reboot just fine, but most times it would not. Checking the DFI support forums, I found that I was not alone in experiencing these issues.
Defective motherboard? No-
DFI did in fact send a replacement board out of a retail stock shipment within a day. A new BETA BIOS was made public by DFI that was supposed to help our issues. It took a few days to get around to testing the motherboard, but again we saw the same exact issues we saw the first time -- more reboot and BIOS hangs.
If I had just spent $199! on one of these stinkers, I would go ballistic!
When SLI came out, people were fond of posting it's trivial issues like "doesn't work with Apple monitor", "doesn't support WS yet", "doesn't work in ancient Windows 2000".
Compare that with "Gee my whole computer won't boot".
I think it's pretty obvious ATI should not have entered this arena at this point in time- Crossfire has been a tale of woe all year, late, limited and malfunctioning at all levels.