Skip to main content

ATI ‘Crossfire’ Targets Nvidia’s SLI

The gaming setup is very similar to Nvidia’s. You need two video cards (one of them a new Crossfire ATI card) and a new motherboard with two video card slots. The two cards work in conjunction to offer better performance in your games and graphics applications. ATI claims that the advantage they have is that their Crossfire systems do not need updated drivers or application updates, they work with every program.

You will need a motherboard based on the ATI Radeon Xpress 200 Crossfire chipset. ASUS, DFI, ECS, GIGABYTE, MSI, PC Partner, Sapphire and TUL should all have new motherboards available shortly.

The Radeon X850 CrossFire Edition cards, with 256MB of graphics memory can be paired with any standard Radeon X850 based graphics card. The Radeon X800 CrossFire Edition graphics cards, which come with either 128 MB or 256 MB of graphics memory, can be paired with any Radeon X800 series graphics card. The standard Radeon X800 and Radeon X850 cards can be purchased new or can be ones the customer already has.

The standard and CrossFire Edition cards will be available from ATI and ATI graphics partners including ABIT, ASUS, Connect3D, Diamond, GeCube, GIGABYTE, HIS, MSI, Pailt, Sapphire, TUL or VisionTek.

System builders such as ABS, Alienware, Cyberpower, Falcon Northwest, Hypersonic, Ibuypower, Monarch PC, PC Club, Polywell, Velocity Micro, VoodooPC, and ZT Group will also carry CrossFire systems for gamers wanting pre-built systems.

The ATI FAQ page does a pretty god job of explaining what you need to get one of their new Crossfire systems up and running.

ATI CrossFire preview at the Tech Report

Also at:

Beyond 3D

Ian Bell
I work with the best people in the world and get paid to play with gadgets. What's not to like?
Nvidia debuts Portal: Prelude RTX, and you can play it for free
Screenshot of Portal: Prelude RTX.

Nvidia has just opened up its bag of RTX 40-series goodies and unleashed all of them on Portal: Prelude RTX, a community remaster of one of the most popular Portal mods.

The game features full ray tracing, as well as support for DLSS 3. To top it off, it also utilizes Nvidia's Reflex and RTX IO tech to improve performance. You can play it for free, but only if you already own the original version of Portal.

Read more
Did Nvidia just fix the RTX 4090’s melting power connectors?
Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 GPU.

Nvidia’s 40-series graphics cards have gained an unwanted reputation for the unreliability of their 12VHPWR power connectors, with numerous accounts circulating online of connectors melting and destroying GPUs. Now, though, it seems Nvidia might have solved the problem for its RTX 4090 graphics cards.

The idea came to light after a post by prackprackprack on Reddit, with the user asking whether their new RTX 4090 featured shorter sense pins compared to older versions of the card. Shorter pins would mean the power supply couldn’t properly connect to a user’s graphics card and send it higher wattages unless the connector was correctly pushed in.

Read more
Even Nvidia’s partners don’t believe in the new RTX 4060 Ti
RTX 4060 Ti sitting on a pink background.

Nvidia's RTX 4060 Ti 16GB is reportedly just days away from launch, but rumor has it that there may not be a lot of GPUs to choose from. This isn't a sign of another dreadful GPU shortage, though. It's more that the RTX 4060 Ti has very little chance to rank high among the best graphics cards you can buy.

We've just recently seen the release of the RTX 4060, but Nvidia still has another card up its sleeve -- a clone of the existing RTX 4060 Ti that comes equipped with twice the VRAM. However, due to certain factors, the GPU might be doomed to a life of subpar sales and unsatisfying benchmark results.

Read more