Powercolor X1900 GT Crossfire Review - PAGE 1

Introduction

It has been over a month since we took a look at how bandwidth availability over the PCI-E bus affects Crossfire when running two X1800 GTO's. Since we received two Powercolor X1900 GT cards for use in our Multi-GPU world tour last month, we've decided to take another look at the bandwidth situation now that two X1900 GT cards can be run in a masterless, cable free environment, thanks to the release of Catalyst 6.7 drivers. In our Multi-GPU article we tested using an ATI provided hot fix driver with the X1900 GT's as the 6.7's were not yet available,. However, with their release two weeks ago, anyone is capable of putting together a dual X1900 system without the hassle of purchasing a seperate, more expensive master card. While X1900 XT cards still require a master and slave setup, the word still stands that R600 cards should be able to run in a dual setup without cables when they ship sometime by the end of this year.

Seeing as these cards are a few months old, we're not going to be focusing so much on the performance relative to other ATI offerings and the competition from NVIDIA, though we have run a limited suite of benchmarks comparing masterless X1900 GT Crossfire to two 7900 GT's in SLI. Our Multi GPU article shows how the two setups compare in more detail in certain games, and the other sites involved are host to an even more thorough look at the comparison.


Before we look at how the performance of these cards however, lets look at the Powercolor cards themselves. It would seem that they have adapted a similar strategy to what they did with their X1800 GTO cards. Read on for more.