Asus Crossfire A8R-MPV runs two X1300s

AFTER MANYdays of struggling with a DFI Crossfire motherboard, the new hope has arrived. We had a chance to test the Asus Crossfire A8R-MPV motherboard based on ATI RD480 Northbridge and Uli M1575 South Bridge.

We were told to look for this motherboard as this ATI - Uli combination will solve some of the ATI Southbridge problems. We had major issues with DFI board that we will describe review that is coming up but Asus board was bread and butter for us.

Just after we booted the motherboard and installed it without a single problem, we wanted to try to run two X1300 cards inside. We used two X1300PRO cards running at 600 MHz core and 800 MHz memory and installed Catalyst 5.11 and got the crossfire up and running. Asus board was stabile with two X1300 PRO cards during all tests and we need to say that you don't need a master card to run two X1300 cards.

All you have to do is to plug two cards in two PCIe slots, plug your display in the card that's populating PCIe master slot and the thing works. We have some scores for you. In 3Dmark05 single card will score 2778 while two X1300 are scoring 4502 marks. More than 60 percent faster in this test while Doom 3 at 1024x768 increased from 36 FPS on a single card to 56.2 with two X1300 PRO cards in Crossfire.

Two X1300 PRO cards will cost you some €220. The best of all Asus motherboard costs just around €120. Stay tuned for the whole review. µ