AMD RD790 is one of the coming chipsets for AMD’s Socket AM2+ platform, which will bring support for HyperTransport 3.0. It seems that AMD’s coming chipset will offer quite a lot more goodies though, among others it will be the first motherboard to support Quad CrossFire. At OCWorkbench they’ve gotten their hands on an AMD RD790 motherboard and have fitted it with four Radeon X1600 Pro graphics cards to show that there really is a support in both hardware and software. The problem is that even though CrossFire can use four cards, it offers no real performance improvements, so far.
We’re assuming AMD is working hard on improving its drivers (we know that for a fact) and that Quad CrossFire will offers some real performance improvements in the future. We’re eager to see when they will launch the first motherboards sporting the technology.
“In the test, a AMD X2 5000+ and a pair of DDR2-667 is used. The board you see comes with 4 full length PCIe x16 slots. It is fitted with 4 graphics cards. The interesting thing is that CrossFire works even with 4 cards, but performance is not ready for 4 cards to improve the performance. The PCIe slots can be configured to run in 2 by 16 or 4 by 8 in CrossFire mode. The south bridge is still the SB600.”
