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Sneak Peek at ATi's CrossFire Graphics System
Kez writes "While at Computex in Taipei HEXUS.net grabbed some benchmarks of an ATi CrossFire powered system. They have since had the chance to reconstruct a similar system and perform the same benchmarks with other cards and configurations to give us an idea of how CrossFire will perform. Obviously, CrossFire's performance will almost certainly change before release time, but in the very least the article provides an idea of what to expect. Interestingly, from these tests it looks like Nvidia's SLI may remain top-dog for graphics performance."
That motherboard they used for testing looks like a monster! 8 sata connectors... I don't want to think about the noise produced by 8 HDs spinning.
Anyway, as with any ATI products... it's better to wait for the final before declaring it a winner or a loser. I tested many beta revisions of their TV wonder USB2 and I saw the performances change with every release, sometimes good, sometimes bad.
-Radicode
In the last test (3DMark05 - 1280x1024 4xAA 16xAF), they are running the Nvidia cards at 4x Anti-Aliasing, while the ATI cards are running at 6x.
Trademarks only generally only valid for one sort of product, and exist to prevent consumer confusion between the makers of similar products. If two companies/people make different products, that are not likely to be confused. they can have the same name for their trademarks - for example, Apple Records and Apple Computers. But if you tried to start a computer company called "Appletastic Computers" Apple Computer could sue you and probably win. Or for a real life example, think of the Lindows case, and how that could get confused the MS Windows OS.
Given that a single Radeon X850 XT as used in the article retails at around $450, I'd say so. $900 would go quite a long way for the rest of the computer.