ATI CrossFire Multi-GPU Technology Preview
CrossFire Platform Specifics
Next we'll have a look at the platform and motherboard technology behind CrossFire. Motherboard partners are reported to be the following:
Asus, Gigabyte, DFI, ECS, MSI, Sapphire and Tul.
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Depicted below are the salient points and feature-set of an ATi CrossFire Edition motherboard.
Both Intel and AMD based CrossFire platforms support Dual PCI Express Graphics slots. When populated with a single card, the boards offer a standard X16 lane PCI Express Graphics configuration. When cards are populated in both slots, the board auto configures two X8 lane PCI Express connections, for a total of 2GB/sec bi-directional (4GB/s total) peak bandwidth.
Beyond that, all the latest technologies are incorporated in ATi's Radeon XPress 200 CrossFire configurations. The major high-points of which we'll note are, SATA II with NCQ, ATi's own "High Definition Audio", Gigabit Ethernet, 4 additional PCIe x1 lanes, up to 5 standard PCI slots, and of course USB 2.0 which is pretty much a given these days.
