Bad news for ATI Crossfire

[madpete]

http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets...oc.aspx?i=2493

DOH!

[REBEL900]

Well ya gotta tip your hats off to NVIDIA, one step ahead of ATI.

[DriveEuro]

The first motherboards are only available from Dell, and other vendors will be brining out products shortly. NVIDIA is shipping chips now, so it shouldn't be too long before we are able to buy an SLI X16 based board.

hahahha, what a joke. Dell gets the goods before us? psh.

[cantankerous]

I dont think this new chipset is going to mean squat. Running your video card at 16x compared to 8x makes next to no difference at all in performance and the added extra chipset WILL increase latency even if only but a bit. One more thing on the board taking up space that we need to cool.

[MaxT]

yeah, this is almost a step backwards for nvidia. Added latency, and no real world performance increase going ot 16x. It's purely a marketing blow against ATI, nothing really important.

[dnavarro]

I don't see how this isn't a blow to ATI. Even if performance is not improved much or at all, standard SLI boards are going down in price and will undercut ATI's "enthusiast" crossfire boards. Not to mention give those trying to save a buck a shot at getting a "cheap" Nvidia SLI board. Finally, to the average consumer "16x" sounds better than "8x".

Ati better release soon.

D

[madpete]

I think you both have a point, from performance standpoint it probably wont hurt ATI too much (just look at the diferance between 8x and x16, barley noticable), but cheaper SLI chipsets will as ATI will have to cut prices to compete.

I like ATI hardware, I will probabley still buy a ATI mobo, but I can't help but feel that they are taking too long to get CF out and it will cost them.

[Fairydust]

Prise on SLI boards seems to be less important, it would seem most people with tight budgets, gladly forgo boards meant for 2 graphic cards and rather choose a Ultra Chipset or Grouper variant.

For the enthusiast performance is priority, and this new chipset doesn't seem to offer any realworld benefits. We'll see when the first useful benchmarks appear.

[madpete]

I wonder which chipset will be on the new rev DFI NF4 when its released?

[drcrawn]

there has been a s940Tyan dual 16x lane pci-e sli board available for months now...it's not like we didn't see this coming for s939...

[IvanAndreevich]

Benchers will like this Otherwise, it's more of a marketing step-up. Nevertheless, it's progress and WILL push the prices down, which is nice

[IYP]

wonderful.....more latency and stuff to cool....

[Onycho]

What I would love to see is a dual core socket 939 with SLI. I drool with the thought of running 2x7800 and 2 X2 CPUs

[Mr. Tinker]

What I would love to see is a dual core socket 939 with SLI. I drool with the thought of running 2x7800 and 2 X2 CPUs

you mean 2 x2's for 4 cores? I think that's what the 940th pin is for.

[Ugly n Grey]

you mean 2 x2's for 4 cores? I think that's what the 940th pin is for.

LOL, yep

[TurboDiv]

Guys guys, ATI is raleasing their first chipset sometime this year where nvidia has been in this market for a lot of years now. We simply can not expect the sky from ATI at this point. They experience many problems that they never experienced before with the production. I would not be surprised if CrossFire gets delayed a bit.

[turtle]

I'm surprised noone has mentioned this is almost a necessity for nvidia. Current high-end cards may not use 8x bandwidth, but I would imagine the next generation probably will, or be darn close to it, and definately by the generation after that. If they didn't release something like this, we would start to see bottlenecks in SLI caused by limitation in the bus speeds, wouldn't we? I mean, say theoretically G80 uses more than 8 lanes, SLI would suck using the older (see: current 2x8 SLI) boards. Granted, current systems will be CPU-limited for the most part long before that threshold for gfx, but it makes sense they would release this and then just export a similar style design straight over to AMD and Intel's future sockets...Right?

Just nvidia planning for the future, and releasing it now...even though it may be useless in it's current form...It makes sense in the longrun.

For the record, I still think Crossfire is coming out in September, but I don't read tea leaves.

[LowRun]

Guys guys, ATI is raleasing their first chipset sometime this year where nvidia has been in this market for a lot of years now. We simply can not expect the sky from ATI at this point. They experience many problems that they never experienced before with the production. I would not be surprised if CrossFire gets delayed a bit.

You mean delayed again.

[Gogar]

Is this right? a chain? I thought socket 939 had like 3 HT links, why not connect both chips directly to the A64?

edit: nvm..

These configurations can vary depending on the manufacturer of the motherboard

edit2: As i've been going through technical docs of the socket 939 i discovered socket 939 indeed only has 1 HT link.

[Harshal]

Yes, I know now that wait is over for many. I should have waited for my ABIT AN8-SLI a bit more. neways I really think considering wide availability of SLI capable cheap cards and boards, consumer are going to go crazy with this low prices...specially in Asia...yeah guys, you will be shocked to see the numbers for mainstream Products.

Bad Luck ATI..... as NVIDIA really Crossfired "SLI-16X" so hard that its gonna hurt.

[Gogar]

One downside is that you'll have two chips that need cooling.

[brandinb]

if i remember correctly the tyan dual chipset motherboard with dual 16x lanes gave a pretty big score increase in 3dmark 05 which actually needs x16 for a score increase. im sure all the big benchmarks will come off dual x16 motherboards but real games i dont think it will do squat
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MONTANA MEDICAL MARIJUANA

[madpete]

I think a lot could depend on how good R520 turns out to be too, if that card really rocks people will buy into ATI / Crossfire.

[drcrawn]

You mean delayed again.

exactly...all this stuff was suppossed to be available in July, July came and went...

[NickK]

Is this right? a chain? I thought socket 939 had like 3 HT links, why not connect both chips directly to the A64?

edit: nvm..

Actually the number of HT buses is set by the A64 chip itself. Desktop (A64,FX, X2 and Opteron 1xx series) have just a single HT bus. Opteron 2xx have two buses for each CPU (hence one bus from each is connected to the other CPU and the other bus on each CPU is free to be attached to southbridges). The Opteron 8xx series have all three HT buses in use - two from each CPU as inter-CPU connects and the third from each CPU available to connect to southbridges.