Huge gains expected with X1300, X1600...
RADEON XPRESS 3200 is scheduled to launch on the very first day of March, when the world will be treated with a plethora of reviews and previews by usual suspects and friends of ATI's Spinola machine.
The motherboards are ready for retail action, with minor tweaks being solved by BIOS updates. The company decided to keep ATI's NorthBridge paired with its own SB450 south bridge, but most of the motherboard manufacturers will pair the RD580 with ULI/Nvidia's south bridge chip, since not many motherboard manufacturers were happy with SB450. The most interesting part was that one motherboard company made an nForce4 SLI board modifying the CrossFire reference design... resulting in the nForce chipset being a happy-puppy overclocker... and the ATI mobo was deemed unstable. But never mind that.
The usual suspect for the reviews at launch will be Asus, which impressed ATI by its execution of short-lived, but sweet X1800 CrossFire launch. The new board is named A8R32-MVP, and only change from the former is the new north bridge chip. We hear that the board is a devious overclocker, and is really stable.
RD580, or the Radeon Xpress 3200 will bring 32 PCI Express lanes dedicated to two PEG (PCI Express Graphics) x16 slots, which are finally working with all 16 data lanes, filling every board with data at a full rate of eight gigabytes a second. While high-end hardware such as X1800 or X1900 won't feel as much of an performance boost, our sources are telling us that the real benefactor will be "mainstream CrossFire", ATI's name for paired X1300 or X1600 boards. When comparing the new RD580 to an older RD480-based board, X1300 should yield a boost ranging from 15-35%, while X1600 should spread the wings by around 20-40%. Remember, all of this just by changing a north bridge.
Although it's too early to tell, it seems that RD580 finally makes Crossfire look like a serious platform. The only problem is Crossfire does not have a good history: X850 Crossfire turned into an unavailable or overpriced, five-months late turnip, RD480 was a cool designed north bridge with a dodgy south bridge, meaning: problematic debugging in R&D sections of mobo manufacturers, X1800XT Crossfire is still a pretty rare bird with zero sense to buy - with the newly designed 3D monster being faster in a single board configuration. And of course, X1900 CrossFire Edition makes sense for the X1900XT only. 1900XTX has 25MHz faster GPU and 100MHz faster memory clock, X1900XL is actually going to be X1800GTO, with fewer pipes, but the same clock speed, and All-in-Wonder X1900 can't use all those shiny TV features when Crossfired.
RADEON XPRESS 3200 is scheduled to launch on the very first day of March, when the world will be treated with a plethora of reviews and previews by usual suspects and friends of ATI's Spinola machine.
The motherboards are ready for retail action, with minor tweaks being solved by BIOS updates. The company decided to keep ATI's NorthBridge paired with its own SB450 south bridge, but most of the motherboard manufacturers will pair the RD580 with ULI/Nvidia's south bridge chip, since not many motherboard manufacturers were happy with SB450. The most interesting part was that one motherboard company made an nForce4 SLI board modifying the CrossFire reference design... resulting in the nForce chipset being a happy-puppy overclocker... and the ATI mobo was deemed unstable. But never mind that.
The usual suspect for the reviews at launch will be Asus, which impressed ATI by its execution of short-lived, but sweet X1800 CrossFire launch. The new board is named A8R32-MVP, and only change from the former is the new north bridge chip. We hear that the board is a devious overclocker, and is really stable.
RD580, or the Radeon Xpress 3200 will bring 32 PCI Express lanes dedicated to two PEG (PCI Express Graphics) x16 slots, which are finally working with all 16 data lanes, filling every board with data at a full rate of eight gigabytes a second. While high-end hardware such as X1800 or X1900 won't feel as much of an performance boost, our sources are telling us that the real benefactor will be "mainstream CrossFire", ATI's name for paired X1300 or X1600 boards. When comparing the new RD580 to an older RD480-based board, X1300 should yield a boost ranging from 15-35%, while X1600 should spread the wings by around 20-40%. Remember, all of this just by changing a north bridge.
Although it's too early to tell, it seems that RD580 finally makes Crossfire look like a serious platform. The only problem is Crossfire does not have a good history: X850 Crossfire turned into an unavailable or overpriced, five-months late turnip, RD480 was a cool designed north bridge with a dodgy south bridge, meaning: problematic debugging in R&D sections of mobo manufacturers, X1800XT Crossfire is still a pretty rare bird with zero sense to buy - with the newly designed 3D monster being faster in a single board configuration. And of course, X1900 CrossFire Edition makes sense for the X1900XT only. 1900XTX has 25MHz faster GPU and 100MHz faster memory clock, X1900XL is actually going to be X1800GTO, with fewer pipes, but the same clock speed, and All-in-Wonder X1900 can't use all those shiny TV features when Crossfired.
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