Gigabyte DS3P Crossfire

Lalumi · 16 Apr 2007 at 14:36

Would the Gigabyte DS3P Crossfire support 2 ATI R600's series

Thanks!

Will_3rd · 16 Apr 2007 at 14:43

Would imagine so, but won't know for sure till the R600 comes out

Lalumi · 16 Apr 2007 at 14:45

ok Thanks

IAmATeaf · 16 Apr 2007 at 15:14

It may support crossfire but will only run at 16x and 4x or 8x and 8x, can't remember which so you'd be better off looking for a mobo that will provide 16x and 16x support.

WJA96 · 16 Apr 2007 at 17:50

IAmATeaf said:
It may support crossfire but will only run at 16x and 4x or 8x and 8x, can't remember which so you'd be better off looking for a mobo that will provide 16x and 16x support.

There are no crossfire boards that do 2 16x channels as far as I know. Because of how Crossfire works, it's almost irrelevant that the second channel is 4x. The DFI RD600 board is 2x 8x in Crossfire mode I think, and that's the best there is.

IAmATeaf · 16 Apr 2007 at 20:10

WJA96 said:
There are no crossfire boards that do 2 16x channels as far as I know. Because of how Crossfire works, it's almost irrelevant that the second channel is 4x. The DFI RD600 board is 2x 8x in Crossfire mode I think, and that's the best there is.

Ahh, OK, didn't know that.

IAmATeaf · 17 Apr 2007 at 11:08

checked on the Gigabyte site and and it reckons the ports are 16x and 4x

WJA96 · 17 Apr 2007 at 12:12

IAmATeaf said:
checked on the Gigabyte site and and it reckons the ports are 16x and 4x

Yes, I never said they weren't. I just pointed out that there were no Crossfire boards that ran 2 16x channels. If you do know of one, then I'll cheerfully amend my post.

As I understand it, Crossfire can only actually use 16 PCIe lanes and it doesn't care where they come from. It uses both GPUs to do the calculations but it then spoofs a single video card to the operating system.

SLi is different (not better, just different) in that NVidia designed the chipset and they could use all the available PCIe lanes (upto 32).

I only mentioned the DFI board as that actually has an ATI chipset and they just allocated 8 lanes to each slot as they can't use more than 16. I probably should have explained why I mentioned that in the first place. Sorry if it gave rise to any confusion.

steve258 · 17 Apr 2007 at 13:30

AFAIK only the ATI Crossfire Express 3200 chipset supports 2*16 PCI-E lanes but the chipset is only available on AMD platform. Nothing on Intel side that will support 2*16 lanes - 975X & RD600 support 2*8 lanes while the 965P supports 1*16 + 1*4 lanes setup.

Lalumi · 17 Apr 2007 at 14:33

so a 8800 640 mb GTS will run on this board?

WJA96 · 17 Apr 2007 at 14:45

Lalumi said:
so a 8800 640 mb GTS will run on this board?

Yes, but it'll just as happily support the two R600's you originally asked about.