ATI Crossfire Multi GPU for the Radeons

Is it Worth the expense?

Is using crossfire worth paying out for. Its always the burning question whenever a new piece of hardware or some new technology gets introduced. Is it worth the money to have it on your system? The most logical answer is always the same, if what you do utilizes the extra speed or quality that the technology gives you then yes its worth the expense. If on the other hand your getting something because you think its just cool then maybe you have a little bit too much money burning a hole in your pocket.

The wonderful advantage of Crossfire and indeed NVIDIA's SLI is that you don't have to buy everything all at once. You can buy a top of the range X850 today and simply use it in your system. The X850 will be good for a while yet. Then should it every get should on power, you can purchase the crossfire edition X850 and providing you have a compatible motherboard you can almost double your graphics performance at a later date. Remember of course that by this time the price of X850 will be substantially lower than the price you paid for the first one.

So to conclude Crossfire is an investment worth thinking about. The better news of course you only need to buy a bit of the kit today and you can build it up over time. Unless of course you simply have to have two X850 XT's in your machine and then hey at least you will have a complete kick ass system.

Nvidia SLI Vs ATI Crossfire

Deciding between SLI and Crossfire might be easy for some, there will be those who go with SLI simply because they prefer NVIDIA's graphics cards and the same will apply with ATI. But for those who genuinely haven't made up there are a few things to consider.

Firstly the graphics cards involved do need to be taken into account. You can't use crossfire with a Geforce 6600 for example so this does have to be taken into account. ATI and NVIDIA's graphics cards have always varied slightly, where as before you could say that NVIDIA's produced faster cards but ATI's had a better quality of image, you can't really go down that road any longer. Each graphics card has to be judged on its own merit these days. You may already have a card from one of these manufacturers and so could be forced financially into taking one or the other.

Next you may have to look at the hardware requirements of each system. In this respect the ATI crossfire system is a little bit more dependant on other hardware than the graphics cards themselves. Crossfire requires you to have a motherboard which is cable of running the crossfire system where as an SLI solution has many more motherboard options available to run dual Geforce cards. The plus side for ATI in the hardware aspect is that any variants of a single chip can be used together in a crossfire system as long as one is a crossfire edition. For example you can use a X800 pro crossfire edition with an X800 XT standard. Geforce cards have to be exactly the same chip model and speed in order to work together in SLI.

Both Nvidia and ATI's solutions use slightly different techniques when sharing the workload between the two graphics cards. Looking at these techniques you may decide that one is better than the other. In practice I think the difference will be small although crossfire does offer you more options to get optimal performance from your two Radeon graphics cards.

In real world use I think just having a dual graphics card system in your machine will give a more than enough of a boost. If you already have a card capable or running as part of a Crossfire or SLI system my advice would be not to worry about changing systems. Simple put that card to good use and buddy it up with another of the same.

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