Will crossfire work on an sli board?

[greatromances]

I'm wondering if the current motherboard i have [gigabyte ga-8n-sli] will allow me to run my x1800xt in crossfire. I'm new to the whole sli and crossfire scene, so i'm not really sure what's going on. I've heard that crossfire doesn't get as good of results that the nvidia sli cards get in sli mode. Can anyone comment on that? And will my mainboard be able to run 2 crossfire cards if it' has sli support? Or do i need to get a crossfire only board (do they even exist?). And would purchasing a second x1800xt card justify the performance to cost ratio, or is crossfire still not mature enough like sli configuration

 

[otispunkmeyer]

no

 

[greatromances]

lol... which question was that answer to?

 

[Ika]

you would have to buy a crossfire-specific board. they are available, you just have to look for them (look for ATi Chipsets, then look for crossfire).

 

[otispunkmeyer]

Originally posted by: greatromances
lol... which question was that answer to?

lol sorry

you will need a mobo with a ATI chipset to use CF, and obviously you will need to get a XF master card (well CF certified board...wil have 2 PCI-E x16 slots)

as for CF vs SLI, SLI has been round longer, had more to time to mature, get the kinks out of it. its a prettty stable plaform now and provides some great speed and IQ boosts over single cards (by IQ boost i mean being able to run higher levels of AA and AF)

it works in pretty much anygame you care to run, and with the 7 series of cards being very cool running pieces of kit, they are actually very easy to manage in a SLI config

CF hasnt been round as long, but has shown some great results for sure. the cards run hotter than the 7 series ones, but if you got good air flow in your case it wont matter. it works pretty much like SLI, it will give you more speed and oppertunity to use higher IQ.

for me id choose SLI still, ive got it now and ive been impressed. SLI uses a bridge connector, where as CF uses a slightly less elegant external dongle. doesnt really mean much to anything other than asthetics

so for me id take SLI over CF

but in reality CF is probably just as good as SLI performance wise, though due to its young age CF will still have driver issues/game issues what not....but with ATI's frequent driver releases you wont be stuck without a fix for long

 

[nitromullet]

in order to run Crossfire, you would need the following:

1) X1800XT
2) Either a Radeon Xpress200 Crossfire, Xpress3200, or an Intel 975X based motherboard with two PCIe x16 slots. Currently, most popular board for socket 939 is the Asus A8R32-MVP Deluxe, which is an Xpress3200 based board.
3) X1800 Crossfire Edition video card

In regards to Crossfire performance compared to SLI, the Crossfire rigs do perform quite well and even surpass SLI in certain areas. That being said, Crossfire is still a younger platform then SLI, and ATI still has yet to produce a worthy southbridge to couple with their northbridge chipset, so you would be getting a motherboard with a ULI southbridge, who is owned by NVIDIA. That mix so far hasn't been an issue, but I wouldn't hold my breath for Vista drivers. As far as cost goes... Well, you really will need to research that yourself, but I would imagine that an X1800 Crossfire card would be fairly expensive in relation to its performance. They were never really available in abundance and are starting to get scarce. You might find a good deal though to make it worth your while...

 

[otispunkmeyer]

Originally posted by: nitromullet
in order to run Crossfire, you would need the following:

1) X1800XT
2) Either a Radeon Xpress200 Crossfire, Xpress3200, or an Intel 975X based motherboard with two PCIe x16 slots. Currently, most popular board for socket 939 is the Asus A8R32-MVP Deluxe, which is an Xpress3200 based board.
3) X1800 Crossfire Edition video card

In regards to Crossfire performance compared to SLI, the Crossfire rigs do perform quite well and even surpass SLI in certain areas. That being said, Crossfire is still a younger platform then SLI, and ATI still has yet to produce a worthy southbridge to couple with their northbridge chipset, so you would be getting a motherboard with a ULI southbridge, who is owned by NVIDIA. That mix so far hasn't been an issue, but I wouldn't hold my breath for Vista drivers. As far as cost goes... Well, you really will need to research that yourself, but I would imagine that an X1800 Crossfire card would be fairly expensive in relation to its performance. They were never really available in abundance and are starting to get scarce. You might find a good deal though to make it worth your while...

least one of us can explain clearly :thumbsup:

i suck at teh explanations! lol but i was trying to say the same things