CrossFire

Okay, I'm more of an ATI enthusiast... But I have seen nothing about CrossFire on Newegg yet. Some of the cards are "CrossFire" ready, but no bridges of CF mobos yet.

What the heck? Is there anywhere you can get them? I am sure they cost an arm and a leg, I am just curious.

 

I'm an nVidia guy myself, so I can't tell you much, as I haven't seen them either, but neither have I looked.
First, you could try www.tigerdirect.com. Between them and newegg, they have most things that are to be found at all. Or try going to the source and check if the ATI website has any sales directory.
Any motherboard that supports crossfire at this point in time is almost certainly going to be ATI branded, as I don't think anyone else is running with the new chipset required to support crossfire.
The crossfire ready label on the cards is mostly useless, as with the crossfire system all the 850.. and 800's as well i believe... will work. What you need to find is an actually crossfire card. This is the support card for the system that has an extra chipsetto combine the two card's worth of info before outputting it to your display. Be warned, with crossfire, the entire system will default to the lowest common denominator, meaning that if your cards aren't perfectly matched, your higher end card will not work to the full extent of it's abilities.
anyways, hopefully my jibber jabber has been of some help,
GreatApe

 

As of a month ago, Crossfire was still under development at ATI. According to Anandtech they hadn't even got AA working correctly yet by the end of July. I wouldn't expect to see anything on the motherboard side for awhile. 2-4 months at least.

 

This page gives the impression that you can do it now:

http://ati.com/technology/crossfire/buildyourown.html

But all of those brand names don't do anything when you click them, and I still can't find any CrossFire mobos or bridges.

 

In order for Anantech to do their testing in the article I linked above, they got a special motherboard from Gigabyte (beta) and special drivers from ATI (also beta). Comsumers are not able to get either of those.

The ATI site you link says you need three things:
1. A Crossfire-ready motherboard, which don't exist on the market yet AFAIK.
2. A Crossfire-ready graphics card. There's a whole lot of X800 and X850 cards that are Crossfire-ready.
3. A Crossfire edition graphics card. Not sure what this is at all. It's probably a Crossfire-ready graphics card with some extra control unit. I don't know of any graphics cards labelled "Crossfire edition," but I have a 7800 GTX so I don't really care about it ATM.

The website you link probably exists because ATI has the hardware designs ready to go, but has no idea when manufacturers will release the required hardware. And I'm still not certain how much Crossfire support is in ATI drivers... hardware manufacturers aren't likely to produce the hardware until there's software that supports the extra manufacturing costs because they won't sell.

You could try going the the home pages of the listed manufacturers. I mean, how difficult is it to Google ASUS or MSI and find their homepage?

 

Now that I look, the only graphics cards I see that are consistently labelled "crossfire ready" are ATI brand. Still no signs of a crossfire-ready mobo or crossfire edition graphics card.

So... you can currently buy 1/3 of the required components. I stick to my 2-4 month assertion.

 

Crossfire might not even be picked up... ATi may just start dumping out cheap mobos that are crossfire ready..

at this website http://ati.com/technology/crossfire/buildyourown.html click on the How it Works video thing and watch the video. It SHOWS a crossfire ready mobo (all red pcb, just like ati ) although it might just be simulated.....