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! :)
