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| Sapphire Pure Crossfire AM2RD580 SLI under CrossFire | |
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(Review by MS, October 8, 2007) |
Summary
ATI's acquisition by AMD opens a huge market opportunity for ATI's Express chipset and CrossFire. One of the first boards to hit the shelves is Sapphire's continuation of its PC-A9RD480 motherboard featuring the new core logic consisting of the RD580 (AM2 version) and the long-anticipated SB600 SouthBridge. Behind the pretty first impression is a somewhat unusual layout with clearance for 3-slot cooling solutions even in CrossFire configuration, a spectacular Azalia-compliant on-board audio and no less than three separate SATA-RAID controllers on board. We took the PC-AM2RD580 and ran it through the paces - but with a GeForce 7800 GT SLI configuration rather than a CrossFire configuration. The combo turned out to be blazing fast and rock solid but with little overclocking potential. And then, there were the minor quibbles....
Intel's release of the Core2 Duo architecture has taken away some of the spotlight from AMD at the top level performance. It would be foolish, however, to completely dismiss AMD from the high-performance sector, especially since there is still a bottleneck in the Core2 Duo supply chain. This opens up a submarine playground for AMD and the necessary infrastructures a.k.a. chipsets and motherboards. The chipset field has been dominated lately by nVidia, especially the nForce 500 series, enabling unparalleled performance for AMD's AM2 processors. Among the factors working in favor of nVidia is SLI, especially since nVidia offers a solid repertoire of cards from the low end to the high performance sector. ATI's Crossfire solutions on the other hand are available at the very high end in form of the X1900 series and moreover at the lower midrange by the X1600 series, leaving a gap that is sort of filled by the X1800 - but not quite..
By comparison, the GeForce 7800 and the lower end versions of the GF 7900 offer an extremely attractive solution just where the performance-oriented gamer wants to be, that is, it is not quite the ultra high end but the price makes it definitely worth a consideration.
The current grain of wisdom dictates that SLI will only work on nForce chipsets, however, as shown in numerous articles across the web, SLI lockout is done primarily on the level of the drivers rather than a feature tied to one chipset or the other. We recently had some lengthy discussions with nVidia's engineers regarding this issue and bottom line here is that nVidia does not officially support SLI on other chipsets because they don't want to put up with the liability that could potentially arise if one were to run SLI on any third party crap.. or so.
In other words, the real issue for not supporting SLI on third party chipsets is quite simply a matter of tech support issues. On the other hand, given the better granularity of nVidia graphics card offerings, especially the combination of SLI with another chipset could be extremely enticing.
Supposedly the hottest chipset out there for the AM2 platform is used in ATI's new R580/SB600 platform. Also, the top partner of ATI is currently Sapphire. Two good reasons to take a long good look at the Pure-Crossfire AM2RD580 motherboard - and do the unthinkable, that is, we run it with nVidia's SLI cards.
next page: => CrossFire Express Chipset Overview =>
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