ATI RD580 Dual x16 Crossfire: Reviews And Info

[perkam]

ATI was roundly criticized for the inability of X850XT Crossfire to run at resolutions above 1600x1200, even though most end-users are not actually able to run at higher resolutions with today's most common 19" and 20" flat-panel displays. We confirmed that the new compositor chips used in X1800XT Crossfire do indeed run fine in Crossfire mode at 2048x1536. ATI tells us there is no limitation in the X1800XT compositor that would prevent even higher resolutions from working as they should.

I dunno if this is going to be released this year, but it would be wise for them to do so.

Perkam

[SnipingWaste]

ATI's chipset Engineering team seem determined to take ATI chipsets to new levels to grab the attention of AMD hobbyists. They seem right on target, since the AMD market has been, and continues to be, driven by the computer enthusiast. Our preview of RD580 on the ATI Manta Reference board showed us some exciting developments are on the way from ATI. Dual x16 video capabilities in a single chip 44 PCIe lane package certainly performed extremely well compared to the just released Dual x16 from nVidia.

The possibility of HTT ratio-free overclocking will also interest the real overclockers out there. Running over 300FSB with a 5X HTT multiplier with current Athlon64 chips seemed an impossibility until we saw it working for ourselves in RD580. We are also glad to see ATI continue their commitment to quality audio on the AMD platform with continued support for High Definition audio codecs. Audio is one area where ATI is clearly outperforming their AMD chipset competition.

The comparison of the RD580 Dual x16 motherboard with X1800XT Crossfire to Asus A8N32-SLI with 7800GTX Crossfire seems a logical comparison to this reviewer. Comparing these results, ATI wins every benchmark. That means if RD580 and Crossfire were shipping today the graphics war would be on and plenty hot. The reality, however, is that X1800XT Crossfire and X1800XT PE are coming soon, and ATI RD580 will likely land in early to mid January. We also expect the ATI R580 GPU to land about the same time, and ATI is hard at work on Socket M2 offerings to be launched with that AMD socket.

This RD580 looks like a killer chipset with 300HTT with 5XHTT and the news about the X1800 XTPE.