![[H]ardOCP](/images/blank.gif){kind=small}
- Date:
- Sunday , January 08, 2006
- Author:
- Brent Justice
- Editor:
- Kyle Bennett
- Google +1
ATI Radeon X1800 XT CrossFire Evaluation
X1800 XT CrossFire is finally here and inside we will show you how it performs in eight games compared to the competition. In this no holds barred fight for gaming domination, who will come out on top?
Introduction:
As we sit here writing this introduction, it dawns on us that it has been three full months since we wrote our last CrossFire evaluation. During that passage of time, we really haven’t been hearing much about CrossFire. This is mostly due to the poor availability of X800/X850 series Master Cards. Furthermore, most people are really not choosing to put their money down on older technology but instead want to wait to pair up ATI’s newest technology in the X1000 series. Well that wait is finally over and X1800 XT Master Cards have finally been released.
The X1000 series family was introduced on October 5th, 2005. However, not all video cards introduced that day were actually available at the time of launch. It has taken nearly two months for all products to show some kind of availability. You can now purchase X1800 XTs—ATI’s current flagship video card. However, some of the other models—like the X1600 XT and Pro—are still very scarce. In fact, X1800 XTs aren’t even out there in as great a number as we had hoped at this point. Still, they can be purchased and they are necessary in order to use the Master Card we have to show you today.
X1800 XT Clock Speeds:
The X1000 series is ATI’s most current generation technology that employs Shader Model 3.0 support, Floating Point HDR with Anti-Aliasing support, a High Quality Anisotropic Filtering method, and more. At the very top of the pack is the X1800 XT clocked at a 625 MHz GPU frequency and a 1.5 GHz memory frequency. In order to make CrossFire function on our original reference X1800 XT with an engineering BIOS, ATI sent us a new BIOS for this evaluation for use on our card. This new BIOS flash added support for CrossFire as well as Overdrive, and the separate 2D clock speed function also works now.
Examine the screenshot above: in 3D mode, the requested GPU frequency is 621 MHz; but while in 2D mode, the actual speed of the GPU is 594 MHz. The memory also runs at a lower speed in 2D mode than in 3D mode (693 MHz versus 747 MHz). The Master Card has the exact same clock speeds.
X1800 XT Master Card:
The very nature of ATI’s CrossFire platform is that you have a MasterCard that can be installed with a slave card. This means that you cannot just pick up any old regular X1800 XT and pair two of them up. You must buy a regular X1800 XT, and then you must buy a “special” X1800 XT MasterCard. The X1800 XT MasterCard has the same amount of RAM as the X1800 XT slave card (512MB), is clocked the same, and even looks the same. The differences lie inside where an onboard compositing chip makes CrossFire possible. The only external difference is a special DVI connector that you use with the dongle. With the new X1800 XT CrossFire video card, ATI has gone dual link DVI. This means that very high resolutions and refresh rates are now possible. No more will you be stuck at 1600x1200 @ 75Hz. The maximum supported resolution in CrossFire mode is now 2560x1600.
To set up CrossFire, you do need an RD480-based ATI CrossFire ready motherboard. Set up is exactly like that of the X800/X850 series. Be warned, though, that depending on your motherboard, you may lose some space due to the length and width of these video cards. On our reference motherboard, the primary IDE port and SATA 1 port are no longer useable due to the length of the video cards.
To make CrossFire work, we put the regular, slave X1800 XT in the slot closest to the CPU on our reference motherboard, and then we installed the X1800 XT MasterCard in the slot farthest from the CPU. You must install the video cards in the correct slot; failure to do will result in no CrossFire. Then you must connect the dongle from the MasterCard to the slave card, and then to your monitor. Once all the hardware is in place, make sure to plug in all power cables including power to the motherboard for the secondary PCI-Express slot.
After all this has been accomplished, boot up your machine, and then go into the BIOS and make sure CrossFire is enabled. If you are lucky, you will be booting into Windows at this point. If you are unlucky, you may get a blank screen. We experienced the blank screen when we tried to set up CrossFire on our system. While set up sounds easy, for some reason, it doesn’t always go smoothly with CrossFire. We were not able to get CrossFire enabled just like we experienced in our X850 CrossFire Evaluation. It took us several attempts of uninstalling and reinstalling the driver along with installing and uninstalling the cards in different orders to get CrossFire enabled. Finally, after about 30 minutes of trying to get it to work, we finally managed to get CrossFire enabled.