Internal Bridge Crossfire with Radeon X1950 Pro
The internal bridge Crossfire with the Radeon X1950 Pro marks the third effort from AMD in the realm of multi rendering solutions. By using internal and dedicated connectors, installation should be easier for end users not to mention it will also reduce the potential for display quality degradation. These are the two main concern gamers and users experience with the first version of,Crossfire that uses a Crossfire cable to connect master and slave cards..Another improvement is the absence of master and slave cards, though actually this is not new. ATI introduced bridgeless / cableless Crossfire with the Radeon X1650 and X1900GT. In this second version of Crossfire, ATI chose to utilize the PCI Express bus to transfer data back and forth between the two cards. There is one problem with this setup - at higher resolutions and with more powerful GPUs, there is a chance the card will transfer more data than the PCI Express bus can handle - effectively saturating the bus.But more importantly, in this type of situations the Crossfire setup will likely not be able to reach its maximum potential.This is one of the reasons why more powerful card such as the Radeon X1900XTX and X1950XTX retains the use of a cable (and master / slave cards) for Crossfire.
They say the third time is a charm and hopefully this is true for AMD Crossfire. Taking example from NVIDIA's SLI, AMD introduced a Crossfire internal bridge and connectors with the Radeon X1950 Pro. Connectors? Yes, each Radeon X1950 Pro supports two internal bridge connectors, most likely to support expansion in the future (three, four cards Crossfire setup). Since Crossfire enabled motherboard didn't bundle the necessary Crossfire bridges to support this new version of Crossfire, ATI chose to bundle one bridge for each Radeon X1950 Pro. However, as we saw during our Radeon X1950 Pro round up, not all vendors adhere to this policy.
The Radeon X1950 Pro is very likely the most popular card in AMD's lineup right now. Though AMD decided to cull shader processing power by equipping the card with 12 pixel pipelines with 3 pixel shader units for a total of 36 shader units, they wisely retain the 256 bit memory bus from the card's more powerful brethen. This allows the card to provide performance close to NVIDIA's GeForce 7950GT, though its selling price is actually closer to GeForce 7900GS levels.
Obviously, we are very interested in seeing what a pair of Radeon X1950 Pro in a Crossfire setup has to offer. In addition to performance, we also like to see whether or not AMD kept their promise about ease of installaion and use.
Installation
Installation was definitely easier than the old Crossfire with cables and dongles. Of course, you still need a Crossfire capable motherboard - the Intel P965 chipset on our Gigabyte P965-DS3P works just fine. Simply put the two cards in the corresponding PCI-E x16 slot, then install the two required bridges. Let Windows install the drivers for the two cards, afterwards you can enable Crossfire from Catalyst Control Center.
Should be pretty easy right? Well, at least in theory. Even with identical cards, there are times when we had to reinstall the bridges (switching them) to enable Crossfire - Catalyst Control Center kept complaining we didn't install the bridges properly.
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