VXI BlueParrott B100 Specifications download pdf (Page 37)

t has ﬁnally arrived: A CrossFire review-

er’s kit. CrossFire is for real. All I needed

to do was build it. I was curious to see

how a single X850 XT CrossFire edition card

would perform, so I held off installing the

companion card. But the ﬁrst time I powered

up the system, Windows immediately blue-

screened. After poring over the installation

guide and troubleshooting everything I could

think of—real reviewers don’t need tech

support—I ﬁnally gave up and called ATI.

“Did you plug the dongle into the vacant

PCI Express slot?” they asked. “D’oh!” I

responded. ATI’s PR person had sent an

email warning reviewers about the dongle—

which instructs the motherboard to oper-

ate the remaining PCI Express slot in x16

mode—because the

company forgot to

cover it in the instal-

lation manual. And I

had promptly forgot-

ten about the email.

With the dongle securely in place, the

system booted and I was able to proceed

with benchmarking. For whatever reason,

the card proved to be just a hare’s breath

slower than a normal X850 XT (but the per-

formance delta is so small that it’s pretty

much meaningless). When I was ready to

replace the dongle with a second X850 XT,

I was able to boot into Windows, but it was

so unstable that many of the benchmarks

crashed mid-run.

I ran through the usual troubleshooting

routines—again. Growing more frustrated by

the moment, I decided to reseat the cards—

again. With a ﬁrm tug on what I thought was

the edge of the X850 XT, I immediately felt a

capacitor give way. Double “D’oh!”

Fortunately, I had a spare Sapphire

X850 XT card. And fortunately, CrossFire

allows you to mix and match videocards

from different manufacturers—I couldn’t

have done that with two nVidia GPUs.

But because the system still wouldn’t

boot, I became convinced that something

had gone awry while installing Windows

and the rest of my benchmark suite, so I

repeated the entire sequence. This time,

the system blue-screened during the

Windows installation!

I called ATI again. “You must have a

bad CPU,” they assured me. “Can’t be,”

I replied; “that CPU and RAM came from

another PC that I knew was working, and

when I put it back in that other machine, it

still worked ﬁne.”

ATI ﬁnally agreed to send another moth-

erboard. In the meantime, I installed a differ-

ent CPU and different memory into the ﬁrst

evaluation system. Voila! The system booted

without incident. As it turns out, ATI’s prod-

uct manager had had a similar experience

with an Intel motherboard: The CPU worked

ﬁne in every other motherboard, and the

motherboard worked ﬁne with every other

CPU. But the two just could not get along

inside the same system.

As for performance, the CrossFire archi-

tecture holds its own against same-genera-

tion hardware. But there’s little reason to

even consider a CrossFire rig when nVidia’s

much faster, next-gen GeForce 7800 GTs

are available for about the same price. The

real question is this: Can dual R520s com-

pete with nVidia’s screamin’ Mimis: dual

GeForce 7800 GTXs running in SLI?

ATI’s dual-GPU launch is greeted by the

sound of one hand clapping

70 MAXIMUMPC HOLIDAY 2005

in the lab

REAL-WORLD TESTING: RESULTS. ANALYSIS. RECOMMENDATIONS

Yes, Virginia, there really is a CrossFire Edition motherboard

and videocard.

MICHAEL BROWN

Benchmarks

CrossFire

BENCHMARKS

Best scores are bolded. ATI benchmarks run on an ATI reference-design, Socket 939, CrossFire Edition motherboard. nVidia benchmarks run on an Asus A8N

SLI Deluxe nForce4 SLI motherboard. Both test beds equipped with 2GB of DDR SDRAM and 2.6GHz Athlon FX-55 CPUs. Halo 1.06 tested at 1600x1200 with

sound disabled. Doom 3 v1.3 tested at High Quality, 1600x1200, 4x AA. Far Cry 1.33 and 3DMark03 Game 2 and Game 4 tested at 1600x1200, 4x AA, 8x aniso.

3DMark03 and 3DMark05 are run using default settings.

2X RADEON 2X GEFORCE 2X GEFORCE 2X GEFORCE

X850 XT 6800 ULTRA 7800 GT 7800 GTX

3DMARK 03 OVERALL 20,468 21,820 24,810 26,768

3DMARK 03 GAME 2 (FPS) 41.4 54.4 64.1 69.2

3DMARK 03 GAME 4 (FPS) 67.8 65.9 89.2 99.5

3DMARK 05 OVERALL 10,398 10,168 11,047 11,379

DOOM3 (FPS) 68.1 74.3 81.2 84.4

FAR CRY (FPS) 122.1 120.0 124.1 128.6

HALO (FPS) 118.4 113.3 124.5 129.1

SPECS

VIDEOCARD GPU PRICE MEMORY PIXEL CORE MEMOMRY

PIPELINES CLOCK CLOCK

ATI X850 XT PAIRED

WITH ATI X850 XT

CROSSFIRE EDITION

Radeon X850 XT

on both cards

$700

256MB on

each card

16 on each card 520MHz 540MHz

TWO NVIDIA

GEFORCE 6800 ULTRA

CARDS IN SLI

GeForce 6800

Ultra on both

cards

$830

256MB on

each card

16 on each card 400MHz 500MHz

TWO NVIDIA

GEFORCE 7800 GT

CARDS IN SLI

GeForce 7800 GT

on both cards

$800

256MB on

each card

20 on each card 430MHz 600MHz

TWO NVIDIA

GEFORCE 7800 GTX

CARDS IN SLI

GeForce 7800

GTX on both

cards

$958

256MB on

each card

24 on each card 400MHz 500MHz

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