System Setup and Notes
| ATI Crossfire System Setups | ||
| NVIDIA SLI Comparison System | ATI Crossfire Test System | |
| Processor | AMD Athlon 64 FX-57 2800MHz, 1MiB L2 |
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| Mainboard | ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe | ATI Halibut Reference Board |
| Memory | 2 x 512MiB Corsair XMS3200 XL DDR-400 2.0-2-2-5 @ 400MHz |
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| Disk Drive | 36GB Western Digital Raptor SATA | |
| Graphics Cards | NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GT 256MiB (G70) (400/500) NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GTX 256MiB (G70) (430/600) 2 x GeForce 6800 Ultra (425/550) PCI Express 16X |
ATI Radeon X850 Crossfire Edition (R480) (520/540) ATI Radeon X850 XT (R480) (520/540) PCI Express 16X |
| Operating System | Windows XP Professional, SP2 | |
| Mainboard Software | NVIDIA nForce4 Platform Driver Version 6.39 |
ATI Crossfire Platform Driver Version ?.?? |
| Graphics Driver Software | NVIDIA ForceWare Release 75 78.03 (non-WHQL, nZone) |
ATI CATALYST 5.9 (non-WHQL, BETA ATI) |
Crossfire Testing Notes
NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Ultra SLI provides the SLI competition with GeForce 7800 GT and GTX showing what the fastest single board performance is all about just now. SLI and Crossfire were both tested in single board configurations, to see what the performance difference is.SuperAA is evaluated, rendering modes are discussed and performance measured in the following pages. Usage of Crossfire from a driver interaction standpoint is also looked at, since the driver is the key to using a Crossfire system properly.
Driver Notes
The initial Crossfire BETA display driver seeded to press has recently been superceded by a later revision that supposedly enhances performance and fixes certain issues. With ATI sample allocation for Crossfire being very low, the hardware required to retest using the new driver was moved on before the new driver appeared. Additionally, the new driver became available too late in the day for retesting to be done before NDA expiry, even if the hardware was still available. HEXUS will retest and report any differences as soon as possible once supported Crossfire display hardware becomes available.X800 Crossfire remains unsupported by any available Crossfire driver by ATI so despite X800 256MiB Crossfire master hardware being available to HEXUS, it's impossible for us to test at the time of writing.
