Page 3
Once you have your mainboard setup then it's time to connect both cards. NVIDIA does it with the SLI bridge and ATI decided to do it with a really bothersome cable. Seriously, we live in 2005 .. we can place 300 million transistors on a graphics core .. yet this we need to do with a cable ? I understand ATI's dilemma though .. but it's just not a charming solution now is it ?
The dreaded Crossfire Y-cable .
Why the cable ? ATI is producing a digital image from the DVI output of the slave card and then sends it to the large connector (DMS-59) on the master board. The master board will, on its terms, prepare its image and then send off both to a compositing engine that is processed on the master board. The master card is responsible for "fusion" of the images between the two boards and that can be done in a number of varieties. So that is why you need a primary card .. you have two cards rendering images and then there's is a compositing engine need which is located on the master card.
Okay .. installation. First mistake I made was not reading the manual. I'm a trial and error kind of guy who likes to learn everything the hard way. I took the master card and placed it into the the upper (most logical) PCI-Express port. I placed the slave card (regular) in the second and had a look if the system would post .. You guessed it already .. no video signal. I then took out the slave card to see if I had a signal, no luck. Then I took out both cards and insert a x1800 XL .. no post.
Then it hit me .. I took the master card and inserted it into slot 2 .. yes we had a system post. The slave card I inserted into the upper PCI-express port, put the cable in place and finally things started working. It's probably for a very good reason but it's not exactly logical is it ?
After mainboard installation it was time the Catalyst drivers. We took the latest 5.12 Control Center Edition drivers and installed them. After a reboot I was surprised that 2 devices still were not installed property. I ran the setup again and after the next boot the devices were properly installed.
Without looking at the drivers I wanted to see if Crossfire was enabled straight out of the box and ran a benchmark. No luck, a single card score. We then opened up the Catalyst drivers GUI and had a look.
There was a Crossfire fragment in the drivers that needed to be enabled, yet I could not enable it. Here's the thing, when you look at the Crossfire y-cable you'll have a DVI connector leading from it. Your monitor "desires" to be connected to that specific connector. My bad, I had the monitor connected towards the lower standard DVI port on the master card.
This photo shows the initial connection, the monitor was connected to the lower DVI connector. In this configuration you can't enable Crossfire mode in the Catalyst drivers.
Well, after I changed that we could enable Crossfire, and with one more reboot out of the way we were good to go. I find this entire installation process to be a bit disorganized and not too user friendly. None the less .. once setup you really are good to go without any issues.
