A good X850 master card in first Crossfire board

THE CROSSFIRE concept is a year old idea. Ever since Nvidia introduced its now successful SLI, ATI was struggling to get its own piece of the action out. We brought you a quick preview twenty days ago and it took us almost that long to make the board stable and to run Crossfire at all. And we are talking about retail products.

Let's start with Club 3D X850XT based Master card shall we. This card didn't cause us any problems and it was running nice and stabile at all times. We have to notice that master card inherit the problems of an old slave cards, as it's noisy. There is nothing much you can do about it.

Club 3D X850XT master card edition box

This is a common issue of an X850 XT PE cards. Club3D X850 master card box includes Power Pack CD featuring Power DVD 5, Power Director, Power Produce and Media show. It also bundles Colin McRae Rally 2005 a very nice rally game and WWF Panda junior in Africa kid game. The card pack includes crossfire master cable, six pin PCIe power cable, DVI to HDTV dongle with dip switches and that's about it.

Club 3D X850XT master card

Power Color Radeon 850XT PE card is packed in a nice box. The bundle includes Pacific fighters flying game, driver CD, Cyber Link Power DVD.
Power Color X850XT PE box

It features DVI to AGP dongle, S video cable, composite cable, S video to four composite outs and HDTV cable. This card was also stabile at all times and we tested this card as a stand alone solution, versus Club 3D master card and in Crossfire mode.
Power Color X850XT PE card

DFI UT RDX200 CF-DR is a Crossfire motherboard with RD480 Northbridge and SB 450 Southbridge. It is the first Crossfire motherboard available and it includes support for just about anything. The very well designed package includes very nice yellow rounded cables for two IDE devices and a floppy, four yellow SATA cables, two SATA power cables, a driver CD, SATA driver floppy that didn't include drivers for ATI SB 450, manual, audio out module and a back panel. Its quite rich motherboard package.

DFI UT RDX200 CF-DR Crossfire motherboard

All the slots on the motherboard are painted yellow and it kind of suits the board. It made it different. The board supports socket 939 CPUs including X2 dual core CPUs, has four DIM slots for two dual channel memory, has two PCIe graphic slot, PCIe 1X, three PCI slots, eight SATA ports - four from SB450 and four from SiL SATA controller. Northbridge is actively cooled while Southbridge was fine with passive heatsink. The motherboard is using its bios reloaded technique that will save you from killing the board when flashing the bios. As ATI chipset is lacking any LAN, DFI is using dual gigabit Marvell 88E8053 LAN cards that were working just fine, and the board supports Firewire as well.

Benchmarketing:
We used :
Club 3D X850 XT Master card edition
Power Color X850 XT Platinum edition
Two cards in Crossfire mode
DFI UT RDX200 CF-DR Crossfire motherboard
Dual core Athlon 64 4800+ clocked at 2400 MHz
2x1024 MB OCZ gold edition PC 4000 memory
Western Digital 8MB 160GB SATA drive
Stock Athlon 64 cooler
OCZ Power Stream 600W PSU

DFI motherboard was the hard one. We got a board with dodgy bios that caused us problems even when we tried to install Windows XP. After some messing and playing we succeeded. We manage to run the board quite stabile in application that it wanted to run. However some games never wanted to play on this board and we still don't know why. Battlefield 2 never wanted to run in any scenario on any card. We also experienced application crushing with Half Life 2 and Counter strike source. Once we used Asus MVP Crossfire motherboard this problem disappeared so it can be attributed to DFI motherboard. The rest was running more or less fine. We also discovered the limitation of a Crossfire cards as they won't let you set any resolution higher than 1600x1200 so we will be missing some scores at 2048x1536. New X1800XT master cards won't have this limitation.

We tested a master card as a single card as well just to show you the difference but I am sure that if you buy a master card you will want to buy a slave card and run them together. Crossfire is running some 50 percent faster in Doom 3 than on a single card. Our far cry test was CPU limited so even the two cards didn't show any difference. Half Life was also limited and we could not see any difference till we turned anti aliasing on. Quake 4 was scoring some 12 FPS faster with two cards getting it to almost to 100 FPS. FEAR was an interesting one as it actually scored less with two cards than with one. If you buy those two cards we strongly recommend running in single card mode till ATI solve this driver issue.

Once you turn the FSAA and Aniso on Crossfire can show its real teeth. Crossfire is more than 60 percent faster in Doom 3 4X FSAA and 8X Anisotropic filtering. We strongly recommend to use those settings when you use two cards, otherwise it doesn't make much sense. We tested all cards on 6X FSAA and 16 X Anisotropic and in 10x7 and 12x10 Crossfire is having a huge advantage, over 60 percent faster while it gets even in 1600x1200. We tried to push the limits to 12X FSAA and 16X Anisotropic and learned that you can get rather playable 29 FPS at 10x7 but anything after that is not playable. This means that with X1800XT Crossfire you will be able to play at some decent frame rates even at these insane settings.

Once we get to 1600x1200 in Far Cry FSAA 4X and 8X Aniso Crossfire manage to show its teeth. It managed to be 13 FPS faster than a single X850XT PE card. Half Life 2 is also showing the difference only when you get to 1600x1200 and we manage to score a seven frames advantage over a single card. Quake 4 is showing almost 50 percent advantage in Crossfire while we got lover score in Fear but we are sure that it's a software bug that can be fixed.

Crossfire rocks in 3Dmark03 and its will increase your score from 12666 to 20127, more than 7000 gain. Its significantly faster in every game and theoretical benchmark. Once you turn the Crossfire on you score 9743 marks while the single card will get you 6405 again a significant performance increase. Every single game and theoretical test will run faster
Club 3D X850XT Master card Crossfire cable

Motherboard test:
In 3dmark05 Crossfire scores some 200 points more than any of the single cards. IN PCmark04 Crossfire scores almost identical on all boards. While the board cards were behaving nicely, we can not say that we were happy with DFI motherboard. The board was not stabile at all time, it had some glitches and it didn't want to run Counter strike source, Half life 2 or Battlefield 2. However the board has some great overclocking features and a lot of potential and we hope that the company will be able to polish those issues. At first we could not run Crossfire at all, new bios helped us so I guess some new bios will solve this problem as well. When it comes to Club 3D X850 XT Crossfire card, she was behaving just nicely and we enjoyed it. Marchitecture limitation didn't let us play at more than 1600x1200 but early adopters of Crossfire should enjoy this card. If you already have an X850 XT or X850 XT PE card regardless of vendor it will run with this card. We tried the good old.

Crossfire shows some potential and we liked the fact that you don't have to match bios' and cards and that you can enable and disable it with a click of a mouse. It took Nvidia quite some time to get there but Nvidia SLI didn't let us run 6800 GT and 6800GS cards together. When it comes to performance except fear you gain up to sixty percent by adding a second card and it can be worth a while upgrade. If you want to get two X850 XT card in SLI and later on move to X1800 Mater card edition or even R580 master card edition this card might be the perfect opportunity for you. It will still lack Shader model 3.0 and won't let you run HDR in its full glory.

Crossfire can mix two different cards and we see this as an upgrade advantage and we were able to set FSAA to 8X or even to 14 X rates and it feel good to know that even those cards are capable of running Quake 4 at those resolutions. This is the first step and a good upgrade option for X850 owners but the real thing comes till the end of the year when we expect to see X1800XT master card edition.

It just needs some more stability and capability and that's what we got from Asus MVP board. Stay tuned. µ

See Also
Club 3D X850 Crossfire, DFI Crossfire board previewed