Crossfire should i wait?

[Bob The Fish]

I am looking to build a crosfire system. I can decide if it will be AMD or INTEL but i know it will be a dual core system with 2 gigs of ram. I allready have 1 gig of DDR1 so i am kinda leaning towards AMD, but there DD2 systems will be out soon enuf so useing old tech kinda sucks. I have used intel cpus and chipsets for years and i have had no complainets. I am looking to spend no more the $3000 cdn on my new system. I know intel has the 975x system and ATI will be releaseing its x2 16x PCIE chipset and i hate waiting and the AIW x1800 XL i have is just sitting there in its box mocking me.

I cant descide what to do. any ideas?

[noneed4me2]

heres the first one out http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16813136165
heres the newest one
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16813135211
personally if had the funds i'd go with the ECS board as it has PATA and SATA and it came out after the DFI board. The DFI did get high marks but I have read in other forums some people had issues, but that could be user based. I have yet to see a review on the ECS board but they have been around awhile so i wouldn't worry to much, plus its about 100 bucks cheaper. If you get a crossfire board can you post your setup process and if you have any problems, in a year or so i am going to attempt a crossfire build. Goodluck :pimp:

[Bob The Fish]

I am going to wait till january, it pains me to look at my new card and no be able to use it but i would rather see what the other mainboard makes have to offer in both INtel and amd flavors befor i buy something.

[Poisonsnak]

Also I have heard that, unlike SLI, crossfire will be available on some of intel's chipsets like the 955X or something, so look for that.

[IE-Kill-Roy]

I would wait as well. Just 1 or 2 more months and a really nice ATi crossfire motherboard will be out. Current crossfire boards are based on the R480 chipset, the new boards coming in Jan or Feb are going to be based on the R580 chipset with the SB600 southbridge. You can read about some interesting info @ : http://anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=2609 . It shows that the new board in combination with the X1800 series beats any current nVidia nforce and even the newer 16x boards. You will love yourself for putting off a month or two.

[TooFast]

is there anyone selling x1800xt mastercards

[Karamas]

wow only $3000 you can build about anything with that.. i would wait to there arent many good crossfire boards out right now only one or to and there are none that can run 2 processors either for amd or intel...

[bruins004]

$3,000 is pretty good and I would wait as well since AMD will be coming out with new dual core as well as intel....Also, there should be some nice GPUs out later since the 7800GTs are coming down in price. How big of a display do you want, bc if you want a large one then that $3,000 might not be enough since monitors are expensive as hell once you go over 20 inches. Also please remember to buy a really, really good PSU and a well known one. I would suggest a OCZ or Antec, but if you wanna go all out then get a PC Power and Cooling with a lotta watts to run the dual core and crossfire without a problem. Anyways sorry for rambling but I would wait as well since crossfire is pretty new and it will get a lot better. If you want to get it now go with SLI since it is much older and the bugs are mostly worked out now.

[noneed4me2]

you may not even have to wait much longer as Asus is releasing the A8R-MVP using a ULI southbridge and pretty decent bios options to boot.Sapphire is overdue with a crossfire board too i think.

[Aevum]

i would skip the 1st gen crossfire boards, ati chipsets havent been the most stable/reliable/decent in the past, also, older ati chipsets always had luckluster results,

if your building an intel rig, you might want to wait for intel to implement crossfire on intel chipsets, i think that future 975 boards will have crossfire support,

then again, you could build a AMD rig :p

and btw, i tested a ECS NF4 board, dont go there, it might look good on paper, but those OST caps are sign of trouble, had problems with cool and quiet not working and some graphics issues, ECS isnt going in to my shopping list ever again, Asrock is the new low cost builder of choice, atleast their boards work.

[TooFast]

it would be nice we clould find a x1800 mastercard!