Six Months with ATI CrossFire

Eighteen months ago when nVidia's GeForce 8800 GTX was king of the hill, a multi-GPU setup was either ostentatious and reserved only for the most die hard gamer if you were using a high-end card, or downright silly if you were pairing up midrange and lower. NVIDIA's SLi initiative, started back with the GeForce 6 series, was basically a kludge designed to wring that last ounce of performance out of the cards of the era for the deep-pocketed enthusiasts. ATI's CrossFire, when it debuted up until the release of the Radeon X1950 Pro, was an embarassment, offering poorer performance and compatibility than NVIDIA's solution.

Flash forward to present day, and the advent of Windows Vista coupled the GeForce 8800GT and Radeon HD 3800 series has completely changed the game. NVIDIA's formerly industry standard drivers are now being beta tested on the consumer with each new release and resulting in stability problems in Windows Vista, and a merged AMD/ATI is fighting tooth and nail to stay in the game after the disastrous launches of the Phenom and HD 2900 lines. With the release of the HD 3800s, ATI had no intention of fighting NVIDIA's top end with a single monolithic GPU having learned their lesson from the 2900, and shifted their focus to producing cooler, cheaper, more efficient GPUs and attacking the price/performance market. Not just that, but to compete with NVIDIA's top end and empty the pockets of the die hard enthusiasts, ATI shifts their high end focus to running GPUs in tandem. The result? A rejuvenated, revitalized CrossFire.

As a media student and part time writer (and gamer), my PC needs to be able to do, quite frankly, everything. I'd been happily running three monitors and a GeForce 8800 GTS 640MB and GeForce 7100 GS, but the instant I switched to Vista (a necessary evil due to using large amounts of RAM), BSODs became a way of life and worse, some guilty pleasures (Doom 3 and Quake 4) just wouldn't run at all anymore. On top of that, I had a motherboard that kept eating the hard drives I had connected in my RAID 0. Finally, around January 2008, I threw my hands in the air, said "screw this," and shifted to a pair of 512MB Radeon HD 3850s (Visiontek's tres sexy Black Box edition) on an X38-based motherboard. I could've gone with one card, but who wants to make a lateral move? It's upgrade time, baby!

Of course, PCs aren't all bread and roses, and multi-GPU has been pretty quirky since its inception. So why should you make the switch? Read on to find out.

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