Crossfire?

Comahawk

I'm looking at upgrading to a AM2+ MB and processor in the near future... I mainly use ATI video cards (ever since I had trouble with nVidea's support) and am very interested in the crossfire capability that the board I'm getting will have.

I know with SLi you need two of the exact same card for it to function, however I read on a blog that this isn't the case with the crossfire boards, that you can put in two cards of the same series (I currently have a 1950 XTX 512meg) and get the added bonus. I'm wondering if this is true or not, because I don't really want to risk hundreds of dollars testing what could just be someones misinformation.

For accuracy, the MB I'm looking at getting is the Asus M3A32-MVP Deluxe and processor wise, the Phenom 9700, when it is released.

vonPoonBurGer

Unless you're looking to live on the bleeding edge of video performance right now, SLI/Crossfire is almost never worth it. For the cost of two midrange cards, you can usually buy one top of the line card and get similar or better performance. For the cost of one top of the line card now, and a second of the same a year from now, you could just buy an entirely new top of the line card at that time and sell the old one for a lower net cost, and get the same or better performance. On top of that, you have the ever-present possibility of driver problems and game compatibility problems related to the SLI/Crossfire setup. You'll be in the minority in terms of your setup, and thus you'll be a lower development priority for driver updates and game patches in the event of any problems. And finally, motherboards with SLI/Crossfire support cost more than those without.

That being said, we're starting to see some video cards that have multiple GPUs right on the card. Down the road, that's much more likely to offer cost-effective performance improvements, in much the same way that multicore CPUs have become the gold standard for boosting performance on a budget, while not undermining system stability. It's going to be a while before we see enough of these for drivers to really stabilize, though, so for now my systems are going to be single-card, single-GPU setups.