ATI’s New Chipset Set to Offer Dual PCI Express x16 Lanes

ATI’s Code-Named RD580 Previewed

by Yaroslav Lyssenko

[ 11/18/2005 | 05:02 PM ]

ATI’s CrossFire multi-GPU technology has taken a long time for the company and proved to be quite a challenge. Mainboards based on ATI’s RADEON XPRESS 200 CrossFire Edition (ATI RD482 chipset) only started to emerge on the market very recently, which means that the first round of multi-GPU clash was by NVIDIA’s SLI, as CrossFire simply could not be obtained. But ATI does not give up and is getting ready to release its new core-logic that should offer new capabilities.

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Since mainboards with two fully-speedPCI Express x16 slots are beginning to appear on the market, ATI is also preparing a competitor with similar specifications. AnandTech has had an opportunity to preview a mainboard featuring a yet unannounced ATI code-named RD580 chipset designed for CrossFire multi-GPU platforms. The web-site compared the RD580-powered dual PCI Express x16 code-named Manta mainboard with the recently released ASUS A8N32-SLI Deluxe mainboard featuring the NVIDIA nForce4 SLI x16 core-logic. The comparison included both single and dual graphics cards head-to-head testing with the GeForce 7800 GTX in SLI mode and the RADEON X1800 XT in CrossFire mode. Apparently, the dual RADEON X1800 XT setup managed to be faster compared to the dual GeForce 7800 GTX system.

“In the comparison of the RD580 Dual x16 motherboard with X1800XT Crossfire to Asus A8N32-SLI with 7800GTX Crossfire, X1800XT Crossfire won every benchmark. That means if RD580 and X1800XT Crossfire were shipping today the graphics war would be on and plenty hot. The reality, however, is that X1800XT Crossfire and X1800XT PE are “coming soon”, while nVidia’s offerings are available today. ATI RD580 will likely land in early to mid January,” concludes AnandTech.

Since such a product is aimed at enthusiasts, overclocking features were also examined. Quite unexpectedly, but the web-site has managed to run HyperTransport bus at over 1500MHz, which is currently the record for the shipping AMD Athlon 64 processors.

“The possibility of HTT ratio-free overclocking will also interest the real overclockers out there. Running over 300FSB with a 5X HTT multiplier with current Athlon64 chips seemed impossibility until we saw it working for ourselves in RD580. We are also glad to see ATI continue their commitment to quality audio on the AMD platform with continued support for High Definition audio codecs. Audio is one area where ATI is clearly outperforming nVidia,” writes AnandTech.

• AnandTech: ATI RD580: Dual x16 CrossFire Preview.