May be the stupidest question ever but Im going to ask anywa

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Romstar

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Jan 5, 2007
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Can I use crossfire on an nvidia a motherboard with 680 as the chipset? Lol this may be stupid but im asking anyways, because I cant find a damn intel motherboard that supports 16x2 pcie for crossfire.(Best ive found is 16x1 and 16x1 x8 eletrical)
 
Well... I can't really say if X2900XTX's will be bottlenecked by x8 lanes (although I doubt it), but that isn't what you should be worried about. ATi cards WILL NOT work in CrossFire on nVidia motherboards. You'll only be able to run one card.

So if you plan on sticking with an nVidia board, your best bet would be to stick it out and wait for the 8900's to come out (since you planned on waiting to the X2900XTX anyways).
 
only the rd600 chip supports 16x2 for xfire, but i would personally go for 975x, since you won't use all the lanes and it ocs better, some intel xfire boards to recommend are the msi 975x platinum powerup and the intel "badaxe"
 
only the rd600 chip supports 16x2 for xfire, but i would personally go for 975x, since you won't use all the lanes and it ocs better, some intel xfire boards to recommend are the msi 975x platinum powerup and the intel "badaxe"
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I assume you are talking about for LGA775. Fort he sake of completeness, RD580 supports 16x2 for crossfire for AMD CPUs (both 939 and AM2).
 
REally? I heard that the DFI RD600 board was pretty darn good at OCing, and that Intel are pleased that AMD aren't making any more chipsets for them. Here's a link:

http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.aspx?i=2891&p=7

So this is probably best for the OP, don't you think?

EDIT: better link:

http://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/1030/15/page_15_final_thoughts/index.html

Get this mobo! It looks great. It's still not dual x16, but it doesn't bus through the southbridge so it's still an improvement on Intel chipsets. (You're better off reading the article!)
 
i heard it was uber expensive though...

however since the guy is gettign 2x x2900xtxs money doesnt seem like a problem, and since i read somewhere that xfire will be chipset independent... why not?
 
i heard it was uber expensive though...

however since the guy is gettign 2x x2900xtxs money doesnt seem like a problem, and since i read somewhere that xfire will be chipset independent... why not?
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It costs the same as any 680i mobo. Similar sort of deal really. Just like it's probably of marginal benefit to go for 680i as opposed to 650i, you might as well go for a 975x mobo as opposed to this one. It's really a die-hard overclocker enthusiast board. The nice thing about it is not having to worry about cpu:ram dividers. It makes OCing an absolute doddle, and also opens up the possbility of extreme overclocks.
 
Officially???No.But I have heard that there is a hack out there for the bios that will allow you to use crossfire instead of sli.But why???Just go buy a board that supports cross fire and you'll have no problems.

Dahak

AMD X2-4400+@2.6 TOLEDO
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First 8800GTX's probably barely use 4x bandwidth so x8 is more than enough bandwidth.

Second... THG's review of the RD600 was absolutely atrocious. RD600 > 975x in all cases except RAID (damn that Intel ICH7 lol).

I have the RD600, and the 580 for that matter, and they are both elite boards. The problem is the BIOS is more complicated than anything anyone has ever seen before. You can accomplish more on the RD600 than the 975x because the 975x requires hard modding in order to get to GTLRef, whereas RD600 has that option in the BIOS. RD600 is the only board to offer BIOS access to GTLRef voltages/settings.

Third, the RD600 at the chipset level consumes less power than a 680i and and has true independent memory clocking, unlike the 680i which uses fancy dividers to get to the "independent" memory speed.

Fourth the board only costs $200 now from the egg, not too bad. Right inline with other high end boards and less than several.

Fifth the board matches the 680i and 965 on FSB oc's THG just sucks at OC'ing lately. Anandtech hit the BIOS imposed FSB limit, not chipset limitation. The consensus is that the BIOS will be altered in the future to allow access to 520+ speeds.

Sidenote: you should be able to run CF on SLI boards but you can't run SLI on CF boards is my understanding.
 
Second... THG's review of the RD600 was absolutely atrocious. RD600 > 975x in all cases except RAID (damn that Intel ICH7 lol).
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and USB throughput. 🙂

I pretty much ignore that useless test, but that doesn't mean you are wrong. 😀

What do you have connected to your USB ports? External hard drive... i'd pay $30 for a E-SATA enclosure and solve that problem lol. 😱

Not a shot at you, but come on... such a silly test. If you buy a mobo based on throughput for an external hard drive... that is just silly and since there is no other RD600 board available it isn't a deciding factor, imo.
 
I thought it was throughput, but maybe it was power? I dunno. I just remember reading something about it. The Intel chipsets allow for more USB devices to be powered or something. Which is fantastic if you want a cola cooler, a microwave for toxic bean burritos, and a fan for your face running on USB in the summer time. 😛
 
The consensus is that the BIOS will be altered in the future to allow access to 520+ speeds.
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can they do that in the BIOS?
afaik it means bypassing part of the clock generator (iirc that's the limiting item ~511fsb) control.
 
RD600 is certainly more power-efficient than 680i, but then so is a 3kW electric fire. :) Okay, I'm exagerating: the RD600 chipset is quite power-efficient, but the gap between it and 975X is nowhere near as wide as the gap between it and 680i.

Of more significance, I think, is the fact that performance on RD600 is several percent slower than on other chipsets (including 975X) if both are run at the same clock speed. Overclocking on RD600 therefore is not something you do to gain performance, so much as it is something you do to bring performance in line with what other chipsets already offer without overclocking. And, as has been alluded to above, overclocking RD600 is really complicated compared with most other boards.

And some 975X boards do overclock quite well: the Intel BadAxe2, for example. (Which also has a reputation for being absolutely rock-solid stable, and was specifically designed for quad-core CPus).

The DFI board that uses RD600 is a great enthusiast product, but it doesn't strike me as something a "normal" user would want to mess with.
 
The consensus is that the BIOS will be altered in the future to allow access to 520+ speeds.
Click to expand...
can they do that in the BIOS?
afaik it means bypassing part of the clock generator (iirc that's the limiting item ~511fsb) control.

I don't think the clock gen is the limiting factor, I think it is strictly written in the BIOS(i.e. a line of code arbitrarily limiting it to 511 for some reason). The board is apparently quite capable of more than 511FSB.
 
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