DFI Crossfire board to be here in two weeks

[RichUK]

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=24794

WE HEARD from people that have seen and partially tested it that DFI's upcoming Crossfire board is a state of the art design. It's highly overclockable, well designed, stable and has all the features that you'll need.
The company demonstated it back at Computex but it's getting ready to start selling it. The boards should be ready in next two weeks.

The board is called the LAN Party UT RDX200 CF-DR and it's based on the RDX 200 Northbridge and SB450 Southbridge. It is ULI free Crossfire motherboard. It's designed to support all socket 939 CPUs including Athlon 64, FX and X2. The board features two PCIe graphic slots but in Crossfire, Multi VPU mode, both slots will operate in eight mode only. This should be enough I guess. The board also has PCIe 1X and three PCI slots.

Apart from floppy and two parallel IDE ports you will find four S-ATA 1 ports and Promise PDC40719 supporting four SATA-2 IDE ports with up to 3Gbps and RAID 0/1/0+1/5.

The board will feature eight USB 2.0 ports and two Gigabit LAN cards both based on the Marvell chipset. One is PCIe, while the second is PCI based. Two port Firewire will also be part of the board based on a Via chipset.

The board will have advanced hardware monitoring support and will have a four Mbit BIOS chip with its reloaded marchitecture. You will be able to tweak just about anything Voltage tuning including DIMM voltage, Northbridge voltage, core voltage and HT voltage. You will be able to adjust your FSB MHz by MHz and will be able to adjust the CPU Multiplier.

Audio on board will be taken care by RealTek ALC882 8CH audio CODEC powered by six audio jacks, a CD-In header and a 5x2-pin Front audio select header and should offer sufficiently good audio. All in all, this board will be among the first and people has high expectations about this board. It should ship within weeks but I guess that will be mainly ATI's call as you need two graphic cards to explore the possibilities of this board

XS Discussion


PICTURE

EDIT: sorry about the pic, this has been updated

 

[rise]

jumperless 4v vdimm for the voltage insane.

it does look sweet. plenty of spacing for card cooling which is good as i think the r520 when it comes is going to be dual slot.

i dunno how much i like the dimm placements but ah well.

it will sell like mad once ati gets some cards.

 

[GuitarDaddy]

Check out Anand's review on the front page. Still a lot of bugs to be worked out, and a single 7800gtx beat SLI's X850XT's in almost everything.

 

[MegaWorks]

Originally posted by: GuitarDaddy
Check out Anand's review on the front page. Still a lot of bugs to be worked out, and a single 7800gtx beat SLI's X850XT's in almost everything.

So R520 will have CrossFire support you know.

 

[SketchMaster]

Well this is the way I see the ATI Vs. Nvidia argument from my point-of-view.

I'm getting ready to switch over to PCI-E. I'm going to be selling my AGP x800pro card and maybe get $200 if I'm lucky. I could be cheap and buy a 256meg X800Pro for around $250, then get the Crossfire card that will go with that and it's MSRP is $300. Thats $350 I would spend With out shipping or tax.

Or I could get a 7800 GTX for $150 more and get twice the power as the ATI setup I listed.

Now I don't know about what the next card ATI is working on. But for the NOW I think the GTX is a better buy.

By the way I'm in no way a "Fanboy" I don't chose sides, I go with what ever works best for the money.

 

[Bar81]

Who cares. Just like SLI, it's a waste of money. Paying double the price for maybe a 50% boost in performance is retarded.

 

[IamTHEsnake]

I'm sorry what?

That picture is of a Lanparty NF4 board, where it also clearly states so.

 

[rise]

Originally posted by: IamTHEsnake
I'm sorry what?

That picture is of a Lanparty NF4 board, where it also clearly states so.

lol, i didn't even look at that pic. i was thinking of this over at xs.

 

[The Pentium Guy]

Originally posted by: IamTHEsnake
I'm sorry what?

That picture is of a Lanparty NF4 board, where it also clearly states so.

Yeah I was wondering. WTF?

 

[Sylvanas]

*Drool* but I just got my Lanparty SLI-D

 

[DanDaMan315]

The external cables in a pretty dumb idea for crossfire.

 

[Bar81]

It's no dumber than an internal bridge and it allows ATI users to use their existing card as a slave without having to buy two crossfire enabled cards. The whole SLI/Crossfire thing is the dumb idea but then again the more suckers that keep paying for it the more they'll produce.

 

[The Pentium Guy]

Major downside to Crossfire is that you've got to buy a Crossfire enabled card plus a regular card, as opposed to 2 regular cards.

 

[imported_Bleh]

Originally posted by: The Pentium Guy
Major downside to Crossfire is that you've got to buy a Crossfire enabled card plus a regular card, as opposed to 2 regular cards.

Yes it is but the price difference is minimal I believe and also ATI is doing some discounts on the master cards to get people to jump on the dual card bandwagon.

 

[BlindBartimaeus]

Just get the 7800GT that will be out soon and forget about it

 

[Rock Hydra]

I wonder...that 850 southbridge is the newer revision, right?

 

[Supershanks]

Major downside to Crossfire is that you've got to buy a Crossfire enabled card plus a regular card, as opposed to 2 regular cards

that need to be almost as closely matched as memory pairs.
Same Model, same revision, same bios.

A lot of people got an SLI board on the basis of I'll run with single card then add a 2nd later, only to find it either can't be done or is a real pain.

 

[imported_Kensai]

What's with the orientation of the ram?

 

[Zebo]

What's amazing is neither nV or Ati is producing a chipset to nForce 2 level. e.g soundstrom and GF4MX graphics.

I think there would be a real market a for a good chipset. But no, it seems like thier competing for lowest common demoniator

No 3d hardware audio acceleration, no decent graphics, no DVI out. Come on throw 6200TC or 300se on there for budget builders.

After AMD puts PCIe on thier chips then what will these guys be good for? Sata? that's a bout it and minor IO. These boards should all be costing $70 being no where near intel features.
:thumbsdown:

 

[Creig]

Originally posted by: Zebo
What's amazing is neither nV or Ati is producing a chipset to nForce 2 level. e.g soundstrom and GF4MX graphics.

I think there would be a real market a for a good chipset. But no, it seems like thier competing for lowest common demoniator

No 3d hardware audio acceleration, no decent graphics, no DVI out. Come on throw 6200TC or 300se on there for budget builders.

After AMD puts PCIe on thier chips then what will these guys be good for? Sata? that's a bout it and minor IO. These boards should all be costing $70 being no where near intel features.
:thumbsdown:

?????

ATI Radeon Xpress 200 : Performance, PCI Express & DX9 for Athlon 64

Optional Integrated Graphics - Radeon Express 200G adds ATI's first DirectX 9 integrated graphics, which can be supported by both DVI (digital) and VGA (analog) outputs. The graphics core is a modified version of the discrete Radeon X300 core with only two rendering pipelines instead of four. Since the logic core is identical on RX480 and RS480, PCIe x16 support is also available. Graphics outputs from both internal and external graphics can be combined in ATI SurroundView.

 

[Diasper]

Originally posted by: Zebo
What's amazing is neither nV or Ati is producing a chipset to nForce 2 level. e.g soundstrom and GF4MX graphics.

I think there would be a real market a for a good chipset. But no, it seems like thier competing for lowest common demoniator

No 3d hardware audio acceleration, no decent graphics, no DVI out. Come on throw 6200TC or 300se on there for budget builders.

After AMD puts PCIe on thier chips then what will these guys be good for? Sata? that's a bout it and minor IO. These boards should all be costing $70 being no where near intel features.
:thumbsdown:

For a more updated look at the ATI chipset look here.. As far as I'm concerned that's pretty exciting stuff given performance is among the best or better than the best nforce4 solutions.

Now more important about the sound I think you might be wrong. If you look at the http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.aspx?i=2481&p=16 of the Anandtech review those are some pretty impressive numbers.

The ALC880 in audio quality scores good-very good compared to average of the previous ALC850 on the nforce4 boards. Moreover, the CPU utilisation is low - perhaps not quite as low as the Audigy 2 sure but pretty damn good and not anything the extra power of AMD can't make up many times over an Intel solution.

So what we have a low cost solution with great sound and low CPU utilisation - what am I missing?

I might also add that unless you were using the SPDIF output on the nforce2 soundstorm analogue quality was rubbish.

Unfortunately, for me I'm having to use it as I connected it to high quality hi-fi separables. As far as I'm concerned that a very nice step up.

I might also add that the DFI solution particularly interests me as there using the slight update ALC882 with their Karajan Audio Module - their Karajan Audio module helped massively reduce cpu utilisation on nforce4 so I can't wait to see how much further it can lower it with the ATI solution. We may see a very competetive solution.

I can't wait for a review.

 

[Diasper]

Also found a place where the DFI Crossfire board is on shortly sale in the UK at Tekheads.co.uk

Now where's those reviews... Or a willing test dummy?

 

[Diasper]

I think however, I'll end up waiting for the second rendition with the SB600 just because I use USB alot myself and hopefully because that will mean DFI will be slightly more used to the ATI chipset so maybe see a few tweaks. Given when I build it it it's going to last me at least two years, I guess I can wait

 

[Diasper]

No one interested?

 

[rise]

i'll get the grouper, no crossfire for me.