possible to run crossfire without master card

pengwin

Distinguished
Feb 25, 2006
2,800
1
20,780
they have to be connected together. by a special cable which requires a special plug.

cards.jpg



see the difference?
 

nottheking

Distinguished
Jan 5, 2006
1,456
0
19,310
is there any possible way of doing crossfire without having the crossfire master card?
Is it possible? Yes.

Should you do it? Not at all, ESPECIALLY for X1800 or X1900 cards.

Without the cable, the computer will resort to using the PCI-express bus to transfer frame data between them, which can be a big drain when you've only got 4GB/sec or even 2GB/sec of bandwidth per card.

Since the X1800 and X1900 don't have the appropriate compositing hardware built-in, they'll have to emulate it, draining performance even further.

In the end, using a pair of X1900s together in CrossFire, without a Master Card, should, at best, only provide marginal improvement over a single card; not worth it.
 

marcus134

Distinguished
Mar 6, 2006
18
0
18,520
unfortunately, this link is in french, but it explain that since catalyst 6.4, crossfire without a master card is supported, the only drawback, is that you don't have the composition chip wich actually mean that the advanced composition features will be disabled. If you want to know what kind of gain you should expect from that combination, just look at the benchmarks for the x1600 in crossfire since it gonna use the same composition mode.
http://www.pcinpact.com/articles/a/195/1.htm

what i say is, if you're about to buy another X1 8/9 00xt to build a crossfire system, don't do it since there's almost no price difference between the xt's and the cf's ones.

if you want to do it with a X1 8/9 00GTO, don't buy the master since the gain of performance versus the cost doesn't worth it
 

mad_fitzy

Distinguished
Apr 14, 2006
399
0
18,780
Not exactly. If you have the cable and a cf master card you can because only the master card has the special port on it. And if you dont have the master card it would be a massive waste of money becuase the performance gain would be absolutely squat. Rather than getting 2 xt's, get 1 xt and 1 cf card. As for crossfired x1800's vs sli 7900gt's look here.
 

enforcerfx

Distinguished
Jun 4, 2006
1,540
0
19,780
the ATi crossfire cards use a cable to connect both into crossfire, nvidia to get SLi, use a bridge to connect the 2 cards. you take the 2 cards, put them into the PCI-e slots, and attach a bridge to the top to connect the cards, producing SLi.
 

enforcerfx

Distinguished
Jun 4, 2006
1,540
0
19,780
a x1300 is only good if you can get them for like 65 bucks and under, and their really not meant for high end games(Battlefield 2, etc.) They only look good to use them instead of integrated graphics, and maybe to watch a movie or two on your computer.
 
is there any possible way of doing crossfire without having the crossfire master card?

Yes it's possible and beneficial for the X1300s X1600s and X1800GTO.

I can't remember who, but a review just compared the X1800GTO on X16 and X8 crossfire, and there's no significant difference.

The also showed it against the GF7600GT and GF7600GT SLi.

IIRC the only major wins for the GF7600GT were Quake4 and F.E.A.R. (which surprised me).