ATI announces dual x16 Crossfire 3200 chipset - tech
(hx) 12:40 AM CET - Mar,02 2006
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ATI today officially introduced its Crossfire 3200 chipset, which was
formerly code-named RD580. The dual-graphics chipset offers two x16 PCI Express
slots and allows users to install two graphics cards without the need for a
master/slave configuration, as it is the case with the Xpress 200 version. The
first review can be found on
Bit-Tech,
HardOCP,
HotHardware,
PCPerspective,
RegHardware and
Sudhian.
HardOCP:
As to the ATI Radeon Xpress 3200 chipset it self, I have to say that it was
everything I hoped it would be. It is a feature-rich solution worthy of any
gaming machine and is very much competitive with other solutions on the market
both in terms of features, technology, and certainly performance. The ATI Radeon
Xpress 3200 is a highly overclockable performance powerhouse. It would seem ATI
has improved on the Xpress 200 in nearly every way. The ASUS A8R32-MVP Deluxe is
a motherboard I can finally recommend to would-be Crossfire users. Even those
who might not be interested in dual video solutions will find this a truly
feature-rich and viable alternative to NVIDIA nForce 4 chipsets for the AMD
platform. With a pair of X1900XTX's in CrossFire configuration, you can rest
assured you'll have the one of the fastest gaming systems money can buy.
HotHardware:
ATI is on the right track with the CrossFire Xpress 3200 chipset. Performance is
competitive with its main competition, and although this is a new and inherently
immature product, the Asus motherboard we tested that was based on it, remained
rock-solid stable throughout all of our testing. In combination with the ULi
1575 southbridge, the chipset as a whole offers a very complete feature set that
includes true dual PCI Express x16 slots for full bandwidth CrossFire support,
SATA 3.0Gb/s RAID support and HD audio. In addition, the chipset also seems to
have a plenty of "headroom" left, as is evident by our excellent overclocking
results. One potential issue that could affect adoption of the CrossFire Xpress
3200 has to do with NVIDIA, however. NVIDIA recently acquired ULi, and we doubt
they'll be too keen on supplying 1575s to ATI's partners for use on CrossFire
Xpress 3200 boards much longer. ATI's own SB450 southbridge is still an option,
but that product's relatively poor USB performance and its lack of SATA 3.0Gb/s
support limit its appeal in the enthusiast community.
PCPerspective:
There is simply no getting around that the Asus A8R32-MVP is probably the best
overclocking motherboard I have ever tested. And since this is the first XPress
3200 chipset I have tested as well, both ATI and Asus can share the spotlight on
that. The ATI engineers told us they built the ability to do these kinds of
overclocking feats into the chipset. So once new BIOS’ are released and other
board vendors start competing for the top spot I am sure we’ll see the
overclocking number soar even higher.
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