Radeon X1800 XT Crossfire

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Once you have your mainboard setup then it's time to connect both cards. NVIDIA does it with the SLI bridge and ATI decided to do it with a really bothersome cable. Seriously, we live in 2005 .. we can place 300 million transistors on a graphics core .. yet this we need to do with a cable ? I understand ATI's dilemma though .. but it's just not a charming solution now is it ?

Copyright 2005 - Guru3D.comThe dreaded Crossfire Y-cable .

Why the cable ? ATI is producing a digital image from the DVI output of the slave card and then sends it to the large connector (DMS-59) on the master board. The master board will, on its terms, prepare its image and then send off both to a compositing engine that is processed on the master board. The master card is responsible for "fusion" of the images between the two boards and that can be done in a number of varieties. So that is why you need a primary card .. you have two cards rendering images and then there's is a compositing engine need which is located on the master card.

Okay .. installation. First mistake I made was not reading the manual. I'm a trial and error kind of guy who likes to learn everything the hard way. I took the master card and placed it into the the upper (most logical) PCI-Express port. I placed the slave card (regular) in the second and had a look if the system would post .. You guessed it already .. no video signal. I then took out the slave card to see if I had a signal, no luck. Then I took out both cards and insert a x1800 XL .. no post.

Then it hit me .. I took the master card and inserted it into slot 2 .. yes we had a system post. The slave card I inserted into the upper PCI-express port, put the cable in place and finally things started working. It's probably for a very good reason but it's not exactly logical is it ?

After mainboard installation it was time the Catalyst drivers. We took the latest 5.12 Control Center Edition drivers and installed them. After a reboot I was surprised that 2 devices still were not installed property. I ran the setup again and after the next boot the devices were properly installed.

Without looking at the drivers I wanted to see if Crossfire was enabled straight out of the box and ran a benchmark. No luck, a single card score. We then opened up the Catalyst drivers GUI and had a look.

Copyright 2005 - Guru3D.com

There was a Crossfire fragment in the drivers that needed to be enabled, yet I could not enable it. Here's the thing, when you look at the Crossfire y-cable you'll have a DVI connector leading from it. Your monitor "desires" to be connected to that specific connector. My bad, I had the monitor connected towards the lower standard DVI port on the master card.

Copyright 2005 - Guru3D.com
This photo shows the initial connection, the monitor was connected to the lower DVI connector. In this configuration you can't enable Crossfire mode in the Catalyst drivers.

Well, after I changed that we could enable Crossfire, and with one more reboot out of the way we were good to go. I find this entire installation process to be a bit disorganized and not too user friendly. None the less .. once setup you really are good to go without any issues.

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