It has taken a very long time for the first retail ATI Crossfire motherboard to arrive. However, ATI could not have done better than to have the first retail board come from DFI, the current leader in motherboards based on the nForce4 chipset. In every performance area important to overclockers and AMD hobbyists, the DFI is at least as good as the legendary DFI nForce4 motherboards. In some areas, the DFI RDX200 is even superior to their nForce4 boards.
DFI took many of the excellent overclocking features of the landmark ATI Crossfire Reference board and added their own unique mark in the final mix. This is the first time that we have seen 4 double-sided DIMMs able to operate at 1T, and it also works using either 1GB or 512mb DIMMs. We don't know how DFI achieved this impossible task, but we can tell you that it works, and the performance boost is very real. The DFI also has a working CAS 1.5 option in the RDX200 BIOS, which is also a first on the AMD Athlon 64 platform.
Buyers are still amazed at the incredible array of tweaking adjustments and voltages on the DFI nForce4 motherboards, and we can only say that the ATI chipset version is even better. Voltages still go to 4.0V to support any memory that you can buy in any overclock situation, but this ATI version has even finer granularity and there is no need for a jumper to draw off the 5V line. Memory control options are even better than the nForce4 version, with DRAM drive strength options from 1 to 15 (1 to 8 to support 2 DIMMs and 9 to 15 for 4-DIMM control).
