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One 101 on Crossfire
Right, it's time to explain Crossfire a little. First off, if you do decide to go the Crossfire path then please do so with the new X1000 series graphics cards. The x800/850 series' biggest limitation with regards to gaming is namely a maximum resolution of 1600x1200 at 60 Hz, and trust me when I say that in this year or the next, high-end gamers will all be moving towards 1920x1200 or higher resolutions with HD gaming around the corner and all kinds of new HD screens becoming available. The new X1000 generation allows exactly what ATI has in mind for Crossfire and has a far better chance in succeeding over the previous generations products. You can smack that rig up-to a 2560x1200 resolution which is great.
Let's walk through the installation
Now here's some good news. Ever since Catalyst 6.5 drivers you'll be able to hook up similar Radeon X1000 series graphics cards from the low and mid-range segment up-to the X1600 without the need for a master card AND you do not need the Y-Cable. Just plug these cards preferably onto a (2x) x16 PCI-Express lane mainboard and it should work. That's really good news isn't it ?
High-end cards like the X1900 series in Crossfire however do require a master and a slave card (although the X1900 GT might divert from that). The master card is a special board, whilst the slave is the usual Radeon that you can or have bought in the stores. Although you can mix among the cards I'd say for optimal performance please match the cards 100% Thus X1600 128MB and one 256MB would be dis-recommended.
You will also need a mainboard that can manage the two cards. ATI introduced a new variant of the Radeon XPRESS 3200 platform, one for AMD and one for Intel systems, based on the RD580 chipset. In the stores they'll be branded as the "Radeon XPRESS 3200 CrossFire Edition mainboard". Today we used the A8R32 MVP Deluxe from ASUS which is really impressive. But obviously we are working with low-end products today, so a much cheaper Xpress1600 is more than sufficient also. But you can find the ASUS A8R32 MVP mainboard under the 100 USD threshold which makes it an awesome buy.
After mainboard installation we insert the two graphics cards, boot windows and install the latest ATI Catalyst drivers. We took the latest Catalyst 6.5 Control Center Edition drivers and installed them. I tried to enable the Crossfire tag in the drivers and yes .. it works. That's it, really simple to do huh ?
As stated .. we are testing today with a an ASUS A8R32-MVP Deluxe motherboard but you can also use the cheaper A8R-MVP motherboard that uses the Xpress1600 chipset.
As reference, I did try these two cards on a nFORCE 590 mainboard and after installing the drivers .. there was no Crossfire support. Quite anoying ...
This is pretty much all you need to do to enable Crossfire.
