Computex 2005 - Looking Ahead

ATI Crossfire Picks Up Momentum

ATI Crossfire was the big story at Computex. Each new day brought more displays of Crossfire dual-VGA boards or an announcement of new vendors that would support the new ATI chipsets. In earlier Computex coverage, we have already shown you pictures of ATI Crossfire boards from Asus (Intel), MSI (AMD), DFI (AMD), Gigabyte (AMD and Intel), Sapphire (AMD and Intel) and HIS.

In addition, ECS made it clear that they would be supplying High-End ATI boards in their new Extreme line.

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ECS will be shipping an AMD Crossfire.

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You will also see an Intel Crossfire from ECS. Both ECS boards were featured on ATI's board wall and they were also on display at the ECS booth.

Jetway displayed boards based on the AMD version of Radeon Express 200, and they will likely produce ATI Crossfire as well.

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In addition to Crossfire in both AMD and Intel flavors, Sapphire also plans to produce a single graphics card version of the Crossfire AMD chipset, which looks like a dead ringer for the latest ATI Grouper Reference board. This board will appeal to many enthusiasts, based on the incredible range of overclocking controls and options that you will find on the board.

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We have talked about the Power Color/TUL ATI Crossfire boards, but we were finally able to catch a picture of a TUL board. This is the single video version, but TUL will also produce AMD and Intel Crossfire versions.

While Abit was not showing finished ATI boards, they announced at Computex that Abit would be producing both AMD and Intel versions of ATI Crossfire motherboards supporting dual-graphics cards.

This time around, manufacturers tell us that they are impressed with the performance and outstanding overclocking capabilities of ATI's Reference Crossfire boards. It is clear that ATI has finally gained the attention of all the top makers of Enthusiast motherboards, since they are all represented in the list of manufacturers that will produce ATI Crossfire motherboards. With this kind of manufacturer support, we are looking forward to testing a production Crossfire board in the near future. Our guess is to expect July or August availability of Crossfire boards in the retail channel.