There she is, the EAX1900 Crossfire master card. Looks familiar doesn't it ? Correct. It's 100% the same as the reference ATI X1900 XTX and XT. Armed with 512 MB gDDR3 memory. It's a beast. This card weighs easily a pound. Next to that it has a two slot cooling solution. That indicates clearly that the card needs much cooling, and it does. The fan disposes tremendous amounts of heat.

When we look at the master card we see one abnormal connector (lower one). This is where you connect the Crossfire y-cable. One lead will then go to the slave card and the other DVI connector on the y-cable towards your monitor.

Dual link DVI pins effectively double the power of transmission and provide an increase of speed and signal quality; i.e. a DVI single link 60-Hz LCD can display a resolution of 1920 x 1080, while a DVI dual link can display a resolution up-to 2560x1200. All cards have two DVI connectors except the 1300 series which has a CRT/VGA connector. Manufacturers however will be allowed to make their own choice in the connectors though.
 

The cooling of the X1800 & X1900 series is dual-slot and rather loud. The dual-slot design however uses an advanced cooler that combines a copper and aluminum-based that keeps operating temperatures to an acceptable level which means you end up with a very stable product.

Really, that's a lovely couple of boxes to receive.