ATI CrossFire - Hands on

Hardware

So, let's get up close and personal with ATI's reference platform.

This is the Evesham system that we received. It comes in a standard case, which has a monster 120mm exhaust. It also comes with both a DVD reader and a DVD writer. Attached is a 420W power supply from Tagan, which appears to have plenty enough juice to power the whole rig, with no instability problems.


Here are the two X850 cards. They look almost exactly the same, the only difference being the presence of the Silicon Image chips on the master card. There's also an LED on the back of the card, which appears to be a status indicator for the display - we noticed it blinking on and off as our CRT clicked on and off.

You can see that the dual DVI ports on the back of the cards aren't quite what they seem. Because of the cable needed to hook up the two cards, the output port on Master card has more than the usual number of DVI pins.


Looking at the motherboard itself, there's a few interestng bits and bobs to note. Aside from the absolutely awesome black and red colour scheme, the Mosfets are covered by a big heatsink, for a start. The Northbridge has a 40mm fan on it, while the Southbridge is passive. There's an extra power connector to provide the juice needed to keep the system stable with two video cards. Onboard the reference platform is a VIA audio chip as well as four SATA ports, four IDE ports and extra USB.

There is also an Intel version of this board available, which we hope to look at very soon.