| #757 - Generic x1600Pro Crossfire |
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| Written by Zach Jeffers | |||||||||
| Saturday, 18 November 2006 | |||||||||
Page 5 of 7
Installation and Testing: Page 5: Installation and Testing Installation of these two x1600Pros was as easy as most any other expansion devices. One great thing about these cards is that you do not have to deal with the coolers taking up an additional PCI slot. These cards gave us complete access to both of our PCI and our single PCIE x1 slots.    We will test these x1600Pros in both single and Crossfire configurations. The use of the ECS KA3 MVP motherboard allows us to utilize the Crossfire Xpress 3200 chipset for our Crossfire controller. This will enable us to do away with any external control cable that would normally be there. With newer x1k series cards, they include jumpers internally between the two video cards. This somewhat resembles the SLI jumpers that you might have seen with nVidia based cards.   The following components were used in the testing of these cards: Case: Ultra Aluminus PSU: Ultra X-Connect2 550watt Motherboard:ECS KA3 MVP Processor: AMD 3800+ X2 AM2 Memory: Crucial Ballistix PC2-6400 2 GB (2 x 1 GB) Video Card: 2 x x1600Pro 256mb DDR2 Hard Drive: Seagate 7200.10 320 GB SATA2 Optical: Plextor PX-740UF PATA  With this review I decided to also see what difference a different driver set might bring to the table. We will be testing using the official ATI Catalyst v6.10 driver for single mode, Crossfire mode and overclocking. We will then also do a round of testing using the popular Omega driver v3.8.291. This type of testing will also be included in my video card reviews from now on! :) |
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