From AT's Crossfire Motherboard Review
The ATI Crossfire AMD is not the perfect enthusiast board, but it is very close. We are frankly disappointed in the mediocre USB performance. ATI tells us that will be corrected with SB600 in about 6 months, but the correction will likely come much sooner with the ULi M1675 Southbridge that features decent USB and full SATA2 support. There is, however, little else to complain about from a performance standpoint. IDE, SATA, and Ethernet performance are exemplary, and some of the Reference Boards in the ATI series even came with integrated graphics just to prove that you don't have to compromise board performance just to have an integrated graphics option. The boards even pioneer Azalia High-Definition audio to AMD users with very low CPU utilization with the HD audio codecs.
In the end, the
ATI Crossfire AMD is without a doubt the best enthusiast-oriented Reference Board that we have ever seen - with performance to match. Unfortunately, that does not mean that the retail boards that you will see with this chipset will be similarly endowed. Our advice to manufacturers is that this is one Reference Board worth copying. A manufacturer who faithfully copies this Reference Board and delivers the same performance as the Reference Board will have a winner on their hands.
Some manufacturers like
DFI have committed to deliver a board as good or better than the ATI Crossfire AMD Reference. Others like Abit, Asus, Gigabyte, MSI, ECS, and Jetway will likely deliver exciting ATI Crossfire boards loaded with enthusiast features that may well match the ATI Crossfire AMD Reference performance.
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