Introduction

ATI enthusiasts haven’t had a lot to cheer about lately. While ATI got off to a quick start earlier this year with the launch of their RADEON X850 series and RADEON X800/X800 XL, since then many of ATI’s planned products have been in a perpetual state of delay.

ATI’s CrossFire technology was first announced with much fanfare at Computex back in June. At the time ATI expected the first retail products to hit shelves one month later in July. Unfortunately for ATI however, July and then August passed without any shipping products, all while archrival NVIDIA successfully launched not one, but two next-generation graphics products capable of delivering significantly more performance than anything else on the market.

ATI’s equivalent next-generation product, the RADEON X1800 is still missing in action, although it’s now known that ATI will be officially introducing it early next month. ATI recently updated the frontpage of their website with a countdown to the X1800 launch, and have issued a press release stating that their high-end, mainstream, and value cards are all in full production and are being built on TSMC’s 90-nanometer manufacturing process. The arrival of these cards can’t come soon enough for ATI, as NVIDIA is not only picking up mind share among enthusiasts, but also OEM design wins among system manufacturers. Losing these sales has put a large strain on ATI’s balance sheet, with the company recently revising their Q4 revenues downward by roughly $100 million dollars.

RADEON XPRESS 200 CrossFire reference motherboard

Active cooling on North Bridge

With all the hubbub surrounding the R520 delay and ATI’s recent financial woes, CrossFire was slowly forgotten.

The root cause of CrossFire’s delay is unknown. Back at Computex ATI was pretty adamant that the hardware was ready, they were just waiting on the drivers. Multiple board partners had their CrossFire products on live displays, and all of them were pretty confident that ATI would deliver products on time: after all, the motherboards were just an adaptation of ATI’s XPRESS 200 chipset, just as the CrossFire graphics cards were largely based on ATI’s previous reference graphics board designs. We then saw more evidence of this for ourselves at the show when we attempted to run a few tests on a CrossFire system with 6xAA, only to see it crash a few seconds later.

The RADEON X850 XT CrossFire card

Black PCB looks good

Whatever the reason for the delay, CrossFire is here now, just in time for existing RADEON users who may be tempted to upgrade this winter, or those of you who may want to build a new system from scratch. With the GeForce 7800 GTX and 7800 GT firmly entrenched at the high-end of the market, ATI has adjusted their pricing on CrossFire since their June launch, with X850 XT CrossFire officially retailing for $349 while the X800 XL CrossFire and X800 CrossFire boards carry an MSRP of $299 and $199 respectively.

Basically, ATI’s positioning the X850 XT CrossFire configuration to challenge NVIDIA’s older GeForce 6800 Ultra SLI, as X800 XL CrossFire competes with two GeForce 6800 GTs and finally, the X800 CrossFire does battle with GeForce 6800 vanilla.

But how well does CrossFire run? That’s what we’re here today to find out.