Fudo over at The Inquirer reports that ATI will be shipping standard and Crossfire edition variants of their upcoming R580+ GPU with the same operating frequencies. Traditionally, the Crossfire edition master card trailed the flagship level model in terms of frequency. For the first time, owners of the top of the line cards will be able to have two cards running in Crossfire mode with no forced decrease in core speed. Although a very welcomed change, it is somewhat ironic that this topic is already destined to become a null issue as ATI's upcoming RD600 chipset will not require a Crossfire edition card in order to run two cards in Crossfire mode. Regardless, it will be interesting to see how performance will improve with ATI's R580 refresh. Fortunately, it sounds as though we could be seeing cards on store shelves as soon as the end of August so the wait won't be long.
"FOR the first time, ATI plans to make Crossfire and the XTX cards clock at the same speed. Both the upcoming Radeon X1950 XTX and Radeon X1950 Crossfire Edition will end up clocked at 650MHz core and 2.0GHz DDR4 512MB memory."
Marco Chiappetta
Marco's interest in computing and technology dates all the way back to his early childhood. Even before being exposed to the Commodore P.E.T. and later the Commodore 64 in the early ‘80s, he was interested in electricity and electronics, and he still has the modded AFX cars and shop-worn soldering irons to prove it. Once he got his hands on his own Commodore 64, however, computing became Marco's passion. Throughout his academic and professional lives, Marco has worked with virtually every major platform from the TRS-80 and Amiga, to today's high end, multi-core servers. Over the years, he has worked in many fields related to technology and computing, including system design, assembly and sales, professional quality assurance testing, and technical writing. In addition to being the Managing Editor here at HotHardware for close to 15 years, Marco is also a freelance writer whose work has been published in a number of PC and technology related print publications and he is a regular fixture on HotHardware’s own Two and a Half Geeks webcast. - Contact: marco(at)hothardware(dot)com
