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LOSTCIRCUITS	SHORTCUTS: Distributed Computing Crossfire - SLI RX200 Chipset Overview At One Glance What You Get Layout VRM On-Board Peripherals BIOS Test Configuration / Debugging Memory, Audio, USB, RAID DOOM3 3DMark'05 Canyon Flight FarCry and 5.12 Drivers Quake4 F.E.A.R. Call Of Duty2 Final Words Comment on this review on the LC Forums
Sapphire Pure Crossfire A9RD480 There was something we meant to say .. but we forgot
(Review by MS, Dec 22 2005)

We were running our initial benchmarks with an X800 GTO2 flashed to an X850XT BIOS, and everything was working just fine. In order to avoid even the slightest hint at degraded performance because of mismatching cards or else the fact that in Crossfire mode the slower of the two cards sets the pace for the entire system, we borrowed another set of Crossfire cards from Wesley Fink over at AnandTech, which needs to be gratefully acknowledged, and ran all benchmarks that we are showing with our Crossfire Master card along with the true secondary X850XT.

One of the issues that surfaced after some of the testing was whether the lower performance of the Crossfire configuration in some of th benchmarks related to the graphics cards or else to the platform itself. Briefly, a single card performed - for all we can tell - identical on both platforms.

DOOM3

   

The yellow and black lines represent the single RADEON X850XT performance on the DFI and and the Sapphire board, respectively. The numbers are a fraction of a percent apart from each other and in order to avoid overcrowding of the graphs, we only show one set of data for the rest of the benchmarks. In some of the benchmarks the overclocked GeForce data are omitted.

   

In DOOM3 as well as in some of the other benchmarks, below 1024 x 768 resolution, we experienced a noticeable performance hit. From what we could gather, the 10 x 7 resolution is the lowest resolution at which Crossfire kicks in, below that, even if Crossfire is enabled in the CCC, it will not be activated since specific strings in the game config file are missing.