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The Verdict ..
So folks .. there you have it. I tried to give you a broad overview of the product that is Crossfire. Let's start with my dislikes. Yeah, we ran into some issues alright. We had several games not performing where they should be (Riddick) and a couple of them (Quake 4, AM3 and Fear) even crashing on a regular basis. That's not exactly what I had in mind for a 3000 USD gaming rig. The bigger part of these issues likely need to be found in the drivers though and, well, ATI has been working hard on drivers the past year or two so I'm confident that with time these bugs will be ruled out. From the other side, it might as well be very isolated to our test system. It might well have been a mainboard issue but I'm really not certain. It does not change the fact that we had some instability though and we always tell it like it is to you guys.
Heat then. If you loop a hefty timedemo for a couple of hours I guarantee you that your room will warm up. My biggest worry for the Crossfire X1800 is that they have to pull there "cold air" from the inside of 
the PC. So you need to make very sure that your PC is extremely well ventilated as when the cards are peaking at 80 Degrees C temperatures on the graphics core, and remember .. it's two of them. The last unsettling aspect was noise .. at boot up it's really bizarre and brought back GeForce 5800 Ultra memories. Things will definitely be more quiet once windows has finished booting as the RPM of the fans will go to a silent level. Yet during gameplay occasionally you will hear the noise levels coming from the two fans really loudly.
Now with these negatives out of the way let's focus with the good stuff. Whilst the X1800 XT Crossfire edition it not a match at all for NVIDIA's 7800 GTX 512MB SLI performance I have to admit that despite a few quirks here and there it'll still light your system on fire. Talking about the GeForce 7800 GTX 512 cards, availability is so bad that prices have sky-rocketed (750 USD at the time of writing this article) towards the moon. I seriously hope that ATI can deliver in volume as promised for the prices advertised as this 300 USD variation will actually make the biggest difference for a lot of you guys.
I think the thing runs on kerosene as gaming performance is of course breathtaking and the image quality fantastic. You need to spend a lot of money for a setup like we tested today though. The cards alone are about 1200 USD. It does offer friggin fast performance for the high-end gamers. The platform as tested today shows really good potential and although this review is not about the mainboard, I really was impressed with the RD480 based motherboard as it is really fast.
The X1800 XT Crossfire is a raw pair of gaming performance, really. It's a fleshy, meaty solution and offers impressive performance. Bare in mind though that you'll need a real beast of a processor for the high-end X1800 cards to get the most out of them. An AMD 64 4000+ or an equivalent Pentium processor is recommended "at minimum". But hey, that's the high-end game.
Let's see .. other stuff I liked. Definitely worthy of mentioning is the ability to hook up four monitors and they can take high-resolutions for sure (crossfire cable need to be removed though). I personally work with two 24" LCDs at 1920x1200 and did not have even the slightest issue at all. Really fun stuff. Think about other functionality also, the media playback/encoding/decoding functions. HDTV, media center, Dual-link DVI, HD gaming, offloading the CPU for playback, H.264 or whatever decoding process you need... this product is capable of it and with the new Catalyst 5.13 drivers it sure is looking good. The new AVIVO implementation seems to be very promising and the Catalyst driver team is working hard on some very exciting stuff for it's enthusiast consumers.
Yes, things do look good; and again do not underestimate the importance of the multi-media trend that is very up and coming. Videocards play an extremely big role in that.
So in retrospect, Crossfire is most certainly looking good. It's not quite there yet as I believe it is a solution in development, but in the upcoming months we'll surely see more and more bugs squashed making this a very worthy competitor towards NVIDIA's SLI solution.
Special thanks to Andrzej and Chris for 'hooking' us up with the samples and their never-ending support.
Company: ATi Technologies
info: ATI.comPrice: 2x 599 USD
