AMD and Intel Crossfire Edition mainboards using ATI core logic
Being so awesome, we've had the ATI Halibut reference board, a partner's Halibut-derived product (both for Socket 939 Athlon 64 and Athlon 64 FX processors) and an Crossfire Edition mainboard for Intel Pentium 4 processors for a little while. Today's article is based around the ATI reference Halibut board for performance and we'll look at the EQS and ECS boards in due course. I'll show you all three in pictures just now, just for your own reference before we review those boards in full outside of this article.ATI Halibut Reference Mainboard
Since you'll never be able to buy the ATI reference board, we'll be cheeky and not show it to you in full. It's far too sexy for that and we'd rather you read the rest of the article instead of sitting there dribbling on yourselves. Here it is stuffed with X850 Crossfire Edition master and an X850 XT slave. Mmmmm, stuffed.
And if you remember a recent HEXUS.pipelines post, the lane remap PCB and DMS-59 connector for Crossfire were sneakily published for all to see.
EQS Halibut Production Mainboard
EQS are the first vendor to supply a Crossfire Edition mainboard to HEXUS so their Halibut gets snapped first.
The things to take note of just now are the PCI Express 16X slots for your pair of graphics cards and the PCI Express 1X slots that live underneath those. The second of those slots is useless with an X8-series Crossfire Edition master board, the dual-slot heatsink stopping you from getting anything in underneath. The first of those slots is similarly blocked off if you use a dual-slot slave board.
Both north and south bridge ASICs are passively cooled, northbridge by the familiar Radeon Xpress-labeled heatsink that we've seen many times in the past. The SB450 southbridge is topped by a low-profile black aluminium cooler.
The EQS board sports four SATA ports, FireWire 400 (VIA chip), Azalia/HD Audio from a Realtek CODEC chip and Realtek GigE networking. Two IDE and one floppy port round off the drive expansion and, curiously, a 20-pin main ATX power connector supplies initial power with the usual P4 connector up at the top near the Socket 939 socket. Four DDR DIMM slots let you use up to 4GB of main system memory and the board's latest BIOS appears to support up to DDR500 speeds when used with a San Diego or Venice core Athlon 64 or Athlon 64 FX processor.
Layout is decent; SATA connectors are grouped and disk expansion and power ports are all on the edges of the board where they really should be. Recent BIOS revisions give the board class-challenging basic performance from graphics, CPU and memory subsystems. And of course Crossfire is fully supported.
ECS Crossfire Edition for Intel Production Mainboard - PA1 MVP Extreme
ECS were first to supply an Intel Crossfire mainboard based around ATI core logic.
The PA1 MVP Extreme supports all LGA775 Intel Pentium 4 processors and up to 4GB of DDR2 memory. Disk expansion is via a 2-port Sil3132NCQ SATA controller (2 NCQ-supporting ports) and the 4 ports available from the passively cooled SB450 southbridge. The ECS suffers the PCI Express 1X slot blocking issues that the EQS AMD board does. Audio is via a Realtek ALC880 HD Audio CODEC chip, networking is a 100Mib/sec RTL8100C on the PCI bus from Realtek and a Marvell GigE chip on PCIe. VIA get FireWire 400 duties.
The RD400 northbridge, as well as providing the PCI Express lanes for the Crossfire graphics setup, provides integrated graphics to boot. Initial testing shows good basic performance compared to competing Intel core logic.
Look out for full reviews of the EQS and ECS mainboards in due course. Performance is next.
