Radeon X700 and X300 used in Crossfire

Crossfire, which is ATi’s answer to nVidia’s SLI-technology is just around the corner and the technology is expected to make its debute shortly. To those who haven’t been following our news reports the fact that you will need a “master card” to be able to run Crossfire might come as a surprise. These master-cards will be launched when ATi announces the Crossfire-technology but as for now you will not be able to use the technology even though that there are mainboards already available supporting Crossfire. This is at least what we though until the people at the Japanese site HKEPC managed to work their way around this.

They have managed to fool the system that one of the graphic cards used was in fact a master-card. This was done via manipulating both the Catalyst-drivers and the graphic card’s BIOS. According to VR-Zone all this took over a month to achieve but now they’ve finally published the results with X700 and X300-graphic cards used in a Crossfire-setup. The only extra ability the master-cards seems to sport are the new image quality features since the performance gained from using a Crossfire-setup without a master-card was quite significant.

In some cases the gained performance with Crossfire is almost to good, so you might want to take these results with a tiny pinch of salt, but to conclude the results are quite interesting even though it would even more interesting to see some “real” Crossfire-systems in action now.

:: Read on at VR-Zone