CrossFire-on-a-Stick

Looks interesting.

It looks more of a "collectors" item though.

fckin useless yanks

Ok, they built it, but their drivers don't work very well. It may perform better than a plain 1950 Pro, but it still gets beaten by the 8800s. And it won't do DX10. So what's the point of it? Spend a lot of money to get an ATI card that doesn't beat a 8800? I already have that in my old 1900 XTX Toxic that I bought last summer. So, no thanks to this card.

Uhh... why did they use an Intel board for their tests instead of the DFI Crossfire one? Since they couldn't get it running on an Nvidia board its obviously dependent on Crossfire, and wouldn't it be better to run it on an ATI Crossfire chipset? Also, if Crossfire was disabled for the Oblivion tests, why did the Sapphire perform so well in the outdoor tests? Last complaint: the article feels like it was hastily put together since it had quite a few typos. Interesting looking product though. Maybe AMD/ATI will release their own version of this with the R600s.

-mcg

A card like that is very hard to swallow when you've got 320MB 8800GTSs running around for less if the price scheme is correct.

fckin useless yanks


meh. Useful, useless... we have the article before you.

because you are on the wrong continent.

Well if people though the 8800GTX was too big...think of this sucker....WOW

They had to translate it from "American English" to "English".

-mcg

fixed

well, it is a pre-release sample. It is not final and yet it DOES beat an 8800gts in some tests... (well, it runs right with it anyway) that makes a possibly viable alternative if all the drivers issues are worked out by retail time. Seems like a cool product, more for the speculation in the article of 32 devices and the inherent benefits of xfire vs. sli... but we will have to see.

I realize that it was a pre-release model, which at least in my mind makes the benches of questionable value. As for its being a replacement for the standard 1900-1950 series, I'm not sure that it meets its goals. Then again, it is a pre-release and not a retail card. For myself, if I was to step up in a video card, I'd either go for a 8800 GTX or wait for the R600 instead of getting another DX9 only card. But that's my choice and other people will make their choices.

They had to translate it from "American English" to "English".

-mcg

fixed

lololol


well you can see the idea has potential, but i guess its gonna take a few more releases before it really starts to kick in.

I don't have a second card as of yet but when I have two final production models I will attempt a four-way crossfire setup. I was traveling all week but I wanted to get this up before the weekend so people could start thinking about the possibilities of a multi-way CrossFire setup.

I tried hooking up an X1950 Pro to the Sapphire X1950 Pro Dual. When the Sapphire was in the first X16 slot and the second card was in the second, I could enable CrossFire. When I reversed the order I could not. I ran a few tests and got the same (similar) figures for 3DMark05 and Doom3.

I am going to see what can be done with the card I have here to see if overclocking is possible. Perhaps we can get more out of the card. I will also try some older drivers to see if there is one that makes CrossFire "happier" than the Catalyst 7.3 I used in the review.

I also plan to keep bugging AMD and Sapphire for a real driver that can enable quad operation.

If you have any ideas on what we should try to do with it (other than suggesting we turn it into a paper weight) I would be up for those.

no, us brits cannot visit the us site, we are redirected and since i aint behind a proxy server, it is a no go.

Interesting engineering project for their engineers, but I don't really see this being a viable product. Mainly due to the timing of the thing.

If r600 is all its cracked up to be, and it is due out in a month or so, assuming this thing launches around the same time, why would anybody want one? I could possibly see such solutions being useful on non-crossfire boards as an upgrade path, but I simply don't see potential buyers for this product.

Lack of DX10 support, and AMD/ATI support also hurt it.

Maybe they are already working on a dual r600 solution as well which depending on price & config could be cool.

Just my opinion, and I am just a lonely pessimistic bastard.

yeah, concept design like the infamous 4x4? couldn't help my self.

i agree, though. not necessarily something that i'd do as a CEO of a company, but... thats probably why i'm NOT a CEO. and it would be cool if there were r600 applications of this technology coming in the near future as phaxmohdem suggested

i meant 4x4 as in amd's 4x4 platform btw

Way to insult 300,000,000 people

actually, on many of amd/atis plan thingys i can't remember the proper name yet, they have a card similar to the 7950gtx2 called the x2900xtxx2, maybe sapphire could be the first people to release such a card since they already have the ground work done?

I certainly hope the retail version (if it comes out) does have functioning drivers. It baffles my mind why a graphics card manufacturer would invest the R&D and bucks into a product that requires driver support and drop the ball on that.

It's size may make it impossible to install in a lot of cases, it doesn't support DX10, and other better chips are already on the horizon. The potential for "quadfire" sounds good, but until we see it working it is just a paper product.

Need graphics horsepower? Stick with two watercooled overclocked 8800GTX cards in SLI.

I remember there being usibility issues...dont think it was driver related, if I remember it was mobo related. Whether or not it was a sli issue or not I dont remember

I am looking forward to seeing what those results are.

I also agree w/ others here about testing against a "regular" cf setup...

rock on man.

Agreed, but then the article should have been put off for a bit. Show the card against what it is supposed to be competing. Show it against a set of 7900GS in sli. Put it up against some 7950GTs. Include an 8800GTS/X to remind people what they could get if they selected a better higher card. But why not include the cards this thing could replace? Sure, I could go find my own link, but it doesn't seem that hard to go find a pair of X1950pros to CF together.

It seems like a certain someones rant against this place was well deserved. Instead of waiting until they could do this right, they rushed it out the door comparing it to many cards execpt what seems like the most logical. I want to see this benchie because it will show us if this is a better way of doing CF or not. If there is a ~3% difference between this card and a "real" CF setup, then I know it isn't any better to do it this way. (from a performance standpoint at least, heat/power might be a different story.)

What are you going to do about it??

About time saphire released it, they showed this thing to the public a long time ago, but I would prefer that they use a sparkle like cooler with dual fans instead of one 8)

Can fathom trying to cool two xtxs on one card? Those would get way too hot, and the x1950pro still beats out the 7950gt, nvidia's priceerformance card, but considering the card held it's own compared to the gtx, I don't know what you are talking about it, it's scores were only slightly lower for most things than the gtx, so I think it's performance is good enough, whether quad xfire will work or not is a different story, but as a stand alone card, it performed quite well and gamers aren't going to switch to vista for a while, very few have, most will stick with xp until all their games perform as smoothl on vista and sp1 has been released, so I don't see much of a problem with the vista issue either, anyone that would be buying this gpu would at least have some computer knowledge and would at least know somethings on the vista issue