RD580. ATI Xpress 3200 CrossFire. Whichever way you say it, it’s the latest chipset from ATI, superseding (but not replacing) RD480 / ATI Xpress 1600 CrossFire. We were sent the Asus A8R32-MVP which is based on RD580, which is positioned to be a higher-end version of the RD480 based A8R-MVP. However, this board is more than just a chipset replacement.
As exciting as RD580 sounds, on paper it’s not a huge improvement over RD480. When in CrossFire mode, RD480 provides eight lanes for each of the
PCI Express graphics slots. RD580 improves on this by providing 16 lanes per PCI Express graphics slot – hence the addition of ‘32’ to the product name. Unlike nVidia’s SLI 16x solution which uses a separate chip to provide the extra 16 lanes, all 32 lines are hard-wired into the new north bridge. Although ATI’s method has theoretical advantages, the actual difference is minimal.
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Mar 2, 2006, 06:27 PM
