ATI Cross-fire Edition used as a single card?

[maverick77_uk]

Hi,

Just a quick question - been looking at ATI crossfire for the first time really. With Nvidia SLI boards (with which I'm slightly more familiar), as long as you have two cards pretty much the same, they work. With ATI, for some chips, you need s Crossfire edition card, in addition to a normal one? Correct? Except 1300 and 1600 where any two do - also correct?

My question is - if you want to get just one card first, can you get the crossfire edition one, and use that on its own? or will these only work in Crossfire mode? Also, if you have two crossfire edition cards, will they work together, or does it HAVE to be one crossfire edition and one "normal"?

Cheers!

[fullfat]

yeah, crossfire edition cards are fine on their own
as far as i know youll need a mastercard and a slave card, as id imagine 2 mastercards would conflict for control. there is a bit more hardware on the master cards you see that will control the slave card.

[nichomach]

ATI are testing drivers which will allow anything up to an X1900GT to work in masterless Crossfire, so depending what you wanted, you wouldn't necessarily need a master card at all.

[-ChEM-]

if you arent using a master card, the card-card communication goes through the PCI-e bus so you are better off with dual x16 slots (as opposed to dual x8s)

[phoney_tech]

if you do get one card then the crossfire master cards are usually clocked lower so the x1900 master card is clocked at x1900xt clock rather than x1900xtx clock speeds

[fullfat]

if you do get one card then the crossfire master cards are usually clocked lower so the x1900 master card is clocked at x1900xt clock rather than x1900xtx clock speeds

but that doesnt matter alot as each card can run independant speeds
its not like an SLi setup in that respect