Crossfire boards

[mpd1981]

Can somebody please straighten this out for me.......

I've built many many sli machines, but i havent worked in IT from the start of the crossfire days, but I under stood you needed a crossfire master card, and a crossfire compatable card. And boards were labelled as sli, crossfire, or neither, usualy when only having 1 pci-e 16x slot.

Now i've been looking at boards recently, and I feel a little confused.

SLi boards are still clearly marked, but very few crossfire boards are, especially Intel boards.
Does this mean they dont take crossfire?

Also, the newer cards like the x1950 pro will do crossfire without having a master/compatable card. Does this effect which boards it will work with. As I know you can use these with the gigabyte DS4, which isnt labelled as crossfire?

Can somebody please clear this up

Cheers

[BUFF]

You can do Crossfire on both Intel 965 & 975 chipsets as long as you have 2x16 PCI-E slots to accept the vga cards.
On 965 the 2nd slot only runs at x4 though so there is a slight performance loss (Anandtech did a review).

In fact afaik there is nothing other than driver support that prevents you from running either SLI or Crossfire on a mobo with the necessary 2 x16 slots - that's why ULi had a chipset that could run either & there are some hacked drivers for SLI on e.g. 975 (Forceware 80 series though so doesn't support latest cards).

[shaithis]

You need a master card for Crossfire, the only time you can forgo with one is if your have an ATI 3200 Chipset.

[MadduckUK]

the X1950 Pro doesn't need any messing about, you can just get a pair of em

struggling with terminology there sorry, don't really follow ATI cards but im sure you get what i mean

[mpd1981]

so you could run crossfire on an sli board? as that has 2 pci-e 16x slots, as long as its a 965 or 975 chipset

[BUFF]

Well, the 965 & 975 chipsets officially support Crossfire.
You can do SLI on them with hacked drivers.