Radeon X1900 XT Crossfire

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The Verdict

Copyright 2006 - Guru3D.comI hope you had a good overview of Crossfire X1900 XT performance. First off, hats off to ASUS for their support in figuring out our initial problems with the mainboard. Our issue was twofold, the first mainboard had a clock issue that needed to be resolved with a new BIOS. Secondly ... it had a defect preventing Crossfire to run properly. What are the odds ? I mean the chances of that happening is close to <NIL but it can happen and it happened to me.

The ASUS A8R32-MVP series mainboards are breathtakingly fast though, it's a rocket and suffice to say that with the new BIOS this is a highly recommended mainboard if you decide to follow the Crossfire path.

The ASUS EAX1900 Crossfire edition mastercard. Specifications and board layout are 100% similar to the reference model Radeon X1900 XT except that the Crossfire card has a compositing engine that makes it a Crossfire master card, that's really the only difference. So with that being said, the ASUS EAX1900 XT/Crossfire of course is a beast. You should see Lost Coast at 1920x1200 with 4xAA, 16xAF, HDR enabled and with every possible IQ setting at high FPS rates. Breathtaking stuff, really. 549 USD is what you'll need to cough up for this ASUS EAX1900 Crossfire mastercard. A "normal" EAX1900 XT will cost you roughly 499 USD.
Now then, when you buy the Crossfire edition card included in the box is everything you need to get started, but no games though. ASUS makes up for it by including the USB game controller which is a robust and quite fun peripheral. The regular X1900XT however will come with a game bundle including the blockbuster movie title King Kong. Good stuff for sure.

The Crossfire experience itself ... it's difficult to form an opinion about it. Just like the high-end SLi combo's the solution is massively expensive as all the components in your PC have to be right. Especially when you are doing the high-end Crossfire setup as we have tested today. I'm not even talking about the money here but the stuff that you need to make this rig run optimally. You need the 2x 16X PCI-Express graphics slots, you need the high-end power supply and most of all do not forget you'll need the fastest processors available to feed that Crossfire driver enough data to make the cards work 100%

Our test results today have shown that majority of games will run into the dreaded CPU bottleneck if you play games below 1600x1200. The dual X1900 XT's really want and can go faster yet even our AMD64 Athlon FX-57 processor (which still is the fastest single threaded gaming processor that money can buy) is not able to kick the crap out of the two X1900 XTs. Now do not get me wrong, as the performance is simply so darn fast .. you won't believe what you are seeing but .. it could be even faster with a better CPU or a future game from 2007/2008 :)

My advise to you for a Crossfire X1900 XTs solution is that both cards have to pull there "cold air" from the inside of the PC. So you need to make very sure that your PC is well ventilated as when the cards are peaking (both of them) at 80 Degrees C temperatures on the graphics core, and again .. it's two of them. An unsettling part was noise .. at boot up it's really bizarre. Things will definitely be more quiet once windows has finished booting as the RPM of the fans will go to a silent level. Yet during gameplay occasionally you will hear the noise levels coming from the two fans really rather audible.

Other stuff I enjoy are the ability to hook up four monitors and they can take high-resolutions for sure, the crossfire cable needs to be removed though. Yours truly works with two 24" LCDs at 1920x1200 and did not have even the slightest issue at all. Think about other functionality also, the media playback/encoding/decoding functions. HDTV, media center, Dual-link DVI, HD gaming, offloading the CPU for playback, H.264 or whatever decoding process you need... this product is capable of it and with the new Catalyst 6.x drivers and higher it sure is looking good. The new AVIVO implementation seems to be very promising as the HQV benchmark scores are high. We received this benchmark yet unfortunately it's a NTSC version.

In short: Any game to date can be played without a hiccup, and when you own a platform such as that described today you'll play these games at the highest resolutions. 14x antialiasing .. not an issue Sir. 16x anisotropic filtering ? You'd be stupid to turn it off ! Understand that today we dropped the 0xAA and 0x16 AF results from our scores completely .. it makes no sense to play games that way with this Crossfire setup, you enable 4xAA and 16xAF at minimum!

No, despite the money you have to cough up and that perfect selection of components you need to make, these cards allow you to play these games at breathtaking framerates with options in image quality that were up-to a year or two ago previously unknown. This gaming rig is the new Joint Strike Fighter and is overtaking a spitfire while in the back of that JSF you'll see the sign "eat my shorts".

My personal thanks go out to Andrzej & Rene for the support and of course ASUS allowing us to test this lovely gear.

Company: ATi technologies
Crossfire info:
ATI.com
EAX1900 Crossfire info: ASUS
Price: ~1050 USD (for both a XT and XT crossfire)

 

Copyright 2006 - Guru3D.com


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