ATI Crossfire

[Lee]

Has anyone had any experience with one yet?

I'm just placing an order for one, but will obviously go for the nVidia solution if it's going to be ropey, not that SLI 7800GTX are stable.

Looking at:

DFI Lanparty UT RDX200CF-DR
Athlon FX 57
2gb Corsair (of course)
2 x 250gb SATA hard drives
Enermax CS 718 case
Enermax 600w Noisetaker PSU
19" LCD

It's looking like 2 ATI Radeon X850 XTs at the moment as the X1800 XTs aren't out till later this month, or maybe a couple of X1800XLs for now.

Should be pretty quick. Just need to cost it all out, fingers crossed I don't clear £2.5k as that's my limit.

Lee

 

[Lee]

Ordered it. £2,245.73 with VAT and shipping.

Had to go with 2 X850XTs as you can't get the X1800 XL Crossfire master card yet.

I'll have to benchmark it once it's together, see how it compares to the Alienware machines we have, Athlon X2 4800 with SLI 7800GTX.

 

[Clart]

is this for you?

 

[Lee]

I wish, it's for a designer spod. Now we have money everyone gets what I feel like trying out.

 

[Munson]

I didnt know the X850s were available in PCI-E...shows how much I know

 

[Griff]

Review in last months CustomPC and it was... well crap in their opinion. And I mean crap.

They did have some nice things to say about the X1800 though.

 

[Lee]

Benchmarks look good, and with the X1800XT it blows away the SLI 7800GTX's.

I just hope it's stable as the nForce 4 with SLI'd 7800GTX's is flakey as hell. Out of the 34 systems we have we returned half the cards and replaced them with X850 XTs to keep them stable.

 

[Griff]

No doubt the X1800 (R520) is going to be a great card but all the reviews on Crossfired X850Xt's say it's overpriced, flawed by the resolution limitations in place and just about matches SLI'd 6800Ultras (not even close to 7800gtx's)

 

[Lee]

No doubt the X1800 (R520) is going to be a great card but all the reviews on Crossfired X850Xt's say it's overpriced, flawed by the resolution limitations in place and just about matches SLI'd 6800Ultras (not even close to 7800gtx's)

I'd be getting X1800XT's but they aren't out yet.

The 7800GTXs really fly, over 13k in 3Dmark and run everything except the Unreal 3 stuff perfectly smooth. Shame they aren't stable at all.

 

[Lee]

Finally the Crossfire Master card arrived yesterday.

Just shy of 12k in 3DMark, which is amazing considering it's only two X850XTs in there. Not far off the dual 7800s in the X2 4800 machines.

If I'd been able to get two X1800s it would have blown the nvidia solution out of the water, and been more stable!!

 

[wozzaa]

Gotta say i like my 7800GTX512

This is the first nvidia card i've really had had radeons since the 7000 but this is an awesome card. And is currentlythe fastest thing you can get. If your having stability problems with sli'd ones theres a few things it could be though.

Power issues general bios problems etc etc.

But i got over 10k out of the box with the 7800gtx without any overclocking on anything and my cpu is a fair bit slower and the card is rather cpu limited. Would need around 3.2ghz to get over the cpu limitations. i dont see myself getting a 1ghz overclock out of a 4400+

 

[Lee]

We've got 34 machines with SLI'd 7800GTX and all of them have the same problems with the same apps. In the end we had to swap half of them out for ATI cards just to keep them stable.

I've worked closely with nvidia, Epic and Alienware on this and it just can't be fixed.

No BIOS version fixed it or driver revision.

The machines all have Enermax Noisetake 600watt dual rail PSUs so that's not an issue either.

The X1800XTs out pace the 7800GTX, the additional 256mb doesn't have an impact yet as no one is coding to accomodate it, except of course nvidias Doom 3. lol

 

[wozzaa]

Its not just an extra 256mb the gtx 512 has mate.

550mhz core on the 512 256 has 430mhz. memory speed is also increased from 1.3 to 1.8ghz.

Have a look around its beats the X1800XT in pretty much everything.

It is basically the 7800Ultra they just didnt name it that way.