Introduction

There is no denying that the initial launch of ATI’s dual graphics CrossFire solution was dismal, to say the least. There were no cards available, you were limited to certain resolutions, it was only available on the Radeon X850 graphics card which was no good because the X1800XT was already available and performance wasn’t that impressive.

With the launch of the Radeon X1900XT and X1900XTX last month, CrossFire cards of this new Radeon series have already popped up at a few places but aren’t in full swing as most people would like. Today thanks to our friends over at HIS in Hong Kong we have got ourselves an X1900 master card along with an X1900XTX as a slave card.

CrossFire hasn’t changed since the X850XT, it still works in the same tedious manner - you need a master card and a slave card. nVidia’s SLI on the other hands just needs two of the same cards yet they don’t even have to be exactly the same which makes it overall a more appealing and simpler option, plus the fact that the nForce 4 SLI chipset is so mature, makes it an overall much more secure option.

Today we will have a look at what we all really want to know, how does the current readily available nVidia top dog (7800GTX) go against the new ATI bad boy when we put two of the graphics cards from each company together?