Asus RD580: the way Crossfire is meant to be played
WE had a chance to test ATI's latest RD580 chipset. We tested a mainstream and high end card, but first of all we should tell you some technical things about the chipset. Crossfire Xpress 3200 is based on RD580 chipset codenamed Skeletor. ATI chipset design team is all about bad guys and good guys and this board was named about cartoon character from Hi Men and the masters of the universe cartoon. ATI made a very small chip of 39 square mm and packed 22 million transistors inside. The chipset dissipates only 8W the fraction of the power compared with other chipsets including its main competition Nforce 4 SLI 2x16. It can be cooled with heatsink only and you can even overclock this board without need to actively cool the chipset. The Northbridge features 36 PCIe lanes which is enough to supply 32 lanes for graphics and to have four more for another PCI 1X slots or interconnection.
Asus A8R-32 MVP Deluxe : Power Color X1900, ATI X1900 XT cards in Crossfire
Test Bed :
Conclusion :
ATI did a good job with its new RD580 board. ATI's Skeletor, Crossfire Xpress 3200 is one heck of a nice chipset, it has the features and it will show you how easy is the overclock the high end CPU. Asus made a very nice board and the board is available now. You should look for Asus A8R-32 MVP Deluxe but we know that it won't be that cheap. Sapphire, Abit and DFI will also have a nice boards based on this chipset. Power color made a nice X1900 Crossfire card and we didn’t have any singly problem with this card. It works just as good as ATI's X1900 master card while we have to say that we were surprised with Radeon X1800XT performance. In Crossfire it manage to stay very close to its X1900, R580 brother. We have to say that sometimes we would get an awkward score while running some of the older games but we think it has to do with power. Once you run the scores a few times, things would clear up but we have to say that we didn’t had this problem with SLI Geforce 7800 GTX 256 cards that would run and give a logical score every single time.
Geforce 7800 GTX 256 MB SLI is no match for and X1900XT Crossfire but we are sure that 7800 GTX 512 would show a better fight. Nvidia will release a new GPU Geforce 7900 GTX 512 and this one has a chance to attack X1900 Crossfire dual card dominance. Until then we think that this is the fastest you will go .
For the complete review with benchies Click Here
WE had a chance to test ATI's latest RD580 chipset. We tested a mainstream and high end card, but first of all we should tell you some technical things about the chipset. Crossfire Xpress 3200 is based on RD580 chipset codenamed Skeletor. ATI chipset design team is all about bad guys and good guys and this board was named about cartoon character from Hi Men and the masters of the universe cartoon. ATI made a very small chip of 39 square mm and packed 22 million transistors inside. The chipset dissipates only 8W the fraction of the power compared with other chipsets including its main competition Nforce 4 SLI 2x16. It can be cooled with heatsink only and you can even overclock this board without need to actively cool the chipset. The Northbridge features 36 PCIe lanes which is enough to supply 32 lanes for graphics and to have four more for another PCI 1X slots or interconnection.
Asus A8R-32 MVP Deluxe : Power Color X1900, ATI X1900 XT cards in Crossfire
Test Bed :
- Power Color X1900 Crossfire edition card at 625/725 MHz
- 2x PowerColor – ATI 1900 Crossfire cards at 625/725 MHz
- 2x ATI 1800 XT Crossfire cards at 594/693 MHz
- 2x Gainward 7800 GTX 256 MB cards at 480x1300 MHz Asus A8R-32 MVP Deluxe RD580 based motherboard
- Asus A8N32 Deluxe Nforce 4 SLI X16 motherboard Athlon FX 57 at 2.8 GHZ
- 2x1024 MB OCZ gold edition PC 4000 memory
- Western Digital 8MB 160GB SATA drive
- Akasa AK128 EVO Athlon 64 cooler
- Akasa 650W multi rail PSU
- OCZ Power Stream 600W
Conclusion :
ATI did a good job with its new RD580 board. ATI's Skeletor, Crossfire Xpress 3200 is one heck of a nice chipset, it has the features and it will show you how easy is the overclock the high end CPU. Asus made a very nice board and the board is available now. You should look for Asus A8R-32 MVP Deluxe but we know that it won't be that cheap. Sapphire, Abit and DFI will also have a nice boards based on this chipset. Power color made a nice X1900 Crossfire card and we didn’t have any singly problem with this card. It works just as good as ATI's X1900 master card while we have to say that we were surprised with Radeon X1800XT performance. In Crossfire it manage to stay very close to its X1900, R580 brother. We have to say that sometimes we would get an awkward score while running some of the older games but we think it has to do with power. Once you run the scores a few times, things would clear up but we have to say that we didn’t had this problem with SLI Geforce 7800 GTX 256 cards that would run and give a logical score every single time.
Geforce 7800 GTX 256 MB SLI is no match for and X1900XT Crossfire but we are sure that 7800 GTX 512 would show a better fight. Nvidia will release a new GPU Geforce 7900 GTX 512 and this one has a chance to attack X1900 Crossfire dual card dominance. Until then we think that this is the fastest you will go .
For the complete review with benchies Click Here