asus 32 crossfire

[Dazboots]

just placed order for my asus 32 crossfire board.

should improve my 3d marks a bit i hope.

soon as it arrives will do a small decription on how im going.

will compare it to my dfi rdx 200 mobo.

will keep u all posted on my progress. ;0

 

[Phil Stanbridge]

I've got one here as it goes, but I'm only using one XTX until I can get my hands on a XTX master card.

 

[Baron_Greenback]

in this months custompc magazine ati are qouted to say they will not release a xtx master card because pf yield problems. issue 031 page 106

 

[Phil Stanbridge]

XTX Master cards are out now. Apparently.

 

[Blow]

XTX Master cards are out now. Apparently.

im getting the, Asus ATI Radeon EAX-X1900 XT-X

is that one of the XTX master cards you was after

or is it a XT ?

 

[Phil Stanbridge]

Well the plot thickens to what is and isnt and whats compatible - some would lead you to believe that there will be XTX Master cards available, then some say that ATI cannot produce the yield so they are shipping XT Masters only - then apparently the cards throttle, then I read that they dont and both load balance. I just dont know what to think, but I do know that ATI have really shot themselves in the foot by making this overly complicated!

I ended up buying a generic XT master and will test it today with my XTX. I'll let you know exactly what happens! I dont even know for sure this combination of cards will work - one is MSI the other is a generic Master ATI reference. Who know eh?!? I'll keep you all updated later.

 

[Baron_Greenback]

i heard both cards will stock run at same speed but the faster "waits" for the slower card to catch up. so i dont see the point have i xtx as a slave, the clever money would be on 2 xt cards

 

[Phil Stanbridge]

I've heard different things, I just dont know what to think - I'll find out soon hopefully!

 

[Master_G]

Just out of interest, have either of you guys with this motherboard (i know you are selling yours now phil but you may know) suffered from the issues described by driverheaven and quite a few on XS:

The first issue we found was that the Sisoft Sandra results for the system were pretty random. On one run we would score in around the expected performance and then a repeat run would show results 10x more than expected. Run it again and we were just as likely to receive a result of about 1000points less than expected. Thinking this was most likely a random issue with Sandra we moved on to PCmark05, however this resulted in more issues being highlighted. For example, hard drive performance on our SATA drive was reporting almost zero. And on occasion some tests would hang or loop . . .

That brings us up to this evening when some of our readers contacted us saying that they and a few others were experiencing random performance issues in real world programs (such as Quake 4 and Battlefield 2) when using their A8R32-MVP. Having read through those issues it was clear that they too had attempted many of the same fixes as us and as they did not have access to the timing fix bios (v 0309) they were left with an unusable board and worse, a waste of money.

They say they have a new BIOS:

Today we received a new bios (v0033 dated 03/07/06 at 4pm) from no less than 4 sources in ATI and Asus! Having run preliminary tests on this bios we can confirm that both Sandra and PCmark now complete without issue. We are looking into 3d testing at the moment however initial results are promising. It is our intention to suggest to Asus that this beta bios is released for anyone with issues as soon as possible (at this time we have not been given permission to distribute the new bios).

But given how it hasnt been released yet i was wondering if you guys had had problems? Not quite so sure about getting this board now.

G

 

[Phil Stanbridge]

I didnt have those issues no, just some quirky drivers - but all will get resolved with a new bios/drivers. Its the same old story. Dont forget we are the guinea pigs!!