Will the masses all be saying "ATI's CrossFire, too little too late?" if the R520 chipsets running in CrossFire outperforms the SLI 7800?
Lest not forget that CrossFire is new, the very same way SLI was when it was first introduced sometime ago...And the issues SLI had then! Moreover, at that time, SLI was not exactly received well by the gaming or hardware community. It took time for Nvidia to iron out all the details and issues. Even now It's still a "work in progress"
Before the bandwagoneers blast CrossFire for it's short comings, give it the chance (with the R520 boards.) the very same way most gave SLI the chance to prove itself. This is where the real comparisons should be levied at in comparison to the 7800GTX. The results just might surprise us all.

Visiontek, like XFX and BFG with their nVidia-based products, offers a "lifetime" warranty on its ATi-based graphics cards. In the case of the nVidia products, you cannot buy a card direct from nVidia in any event, with any warranty...;) These "lifetime" warranties are all offered by the AIB partners and *not* by ATi or nV direct.

Although ATi made its intention to gradually withdraw from the direct sales of its cards through retail known years ago, ATi has yet to withdraw. I would guess this is the first step in that withdrawal which, when complete, will mean that ATi just like nVidia will not be selling its products direct to the public, but only through 3rd-party AIB partners like VisionTek and Sapphire and PowerColor, etc. So, just like with nV, the ATi AIB partners will be setting their own warranties for their ATi-based products.

Even though ATi has just reduced its direct warranty, at least you can *buy* a product direct from ATi at present, which you cannot do from nVidia and have never been able to do. Seems odd to directly compare ATi's direct sales warranties to nVidia's AIB partner warranties without making mention of the fact that ATi also sells through its own AIB partners who offer warranties exactly like BFG's and XFX's.
So this whole warranty issue is quite the non-issue. Unless of course you are a fanboy of a particular company or have a bone to pick with another company........

I agree with this statement, "So, a warranty is simply a cost item for a manufacturer. The longer you warrant something the more failures you will have to pay for. Especially when you cut corners by using lesser quality parts....."

In my humbe opinion: I think ATI is not able to solve the "heating issue" thus way there is a large video HSF presence and maybe why the pipeline was reduce from 32 to 12. As for the refresher rate @ 60MHz, I am sure a driver update will fix that.

I've seen A_Pickle posting over at TR as well, and its obvious he's just a delusional fanboy who is trying desperately to paint ATi as some sort of Luke Skywalker to Nvidia's Darth Vader.

There are plenty of things to like about ATi hardware. The All-In-Wonder cards speak for themselves. In the days of the FX 5800 and 5900 I myself considered switching to ATi, but the 6000 series from Nvidia redeemed my faith in them. So ATi has done battle with the market leader and won for a generation of products. Its admirable that they have tried to catch up to the SLi craze with their Crossfire solution, and I would hope it becomes better in the future.

HOWEVER...

For right now, ATi has a lot of things going against it, and they have no one to blame but themselves. They decided not to implement SM3 in their last generation and their HDR implementation is poorer than Nvidia's. They have had difficulty from day one in mass producing their highest end cards and have been plagued by paper launches. They've had a hell of a time producing R520, and their Crossfire solution, while providing decent performance, is at best a very big "compromise" and seems to be a last minute kludge job to cash in on the market Nvidia re-created.

These are all due to any number of issues within ATi itself (many of which we'll probably never know about). You cannot blame one company's poor performance on anyone but themselves. ATi are masters of their own fate and they are capable of great things, as they showed us with the Radeon 9700 and 9800 cards as well as the All-In-Wonder series. Since we know they are capable of doing well, and that they are currently not doing so well, there must be internal issues. Perhaps their designs were too complicated for good yields. Perhaps they underestimated Nvidia's ability to bounce back after the FX series debacle. Maybe they just have poor management - who knows? The point is... like a high schooler with poor grades, its their problem to resolve, and not something we can blame on the kid getting a 4.0 GPA.

Nvidia has been doing almost everything right. They've got good yields on their new products, broke the industry standard paper launch, lowered prices almost immediately on their next gen products, and have quite frankly done phenomenal things with their driver revisions. They are "running on all eight cylinders" as it were.

Monday will tell us if R520 shows ATi returning to its past good performance, or is another sign of their troubled recent past. For my part, although I am an Nvidia fan, I hope they have better luck soon. If they don't, though, I'll place the blame squarely where it lies - at ATi's feet.

"...I've seen A_Pickle posting over at TR as well, and its obvious he's just a delusional fanboy who is trying desperately to paint ATi as some sort of Luke Skywalker to Nvidia's Darth Vader..."

Well, you threw the name out first, so I'll reply to that firstly. With no due respect whatsoever, you're an idiot.

To continue, I like ATI, and credible benchmarks show that their products compete very well with Nvidia cards. The ONLY exception to this the 7800 GTX, which even there many sites are beginning to think that next week's X1800 XT might, in fact, be slightly BETTER overall.

I am disappointed in ATI's recent warranty choices, and I am by no means pleased with the fact that ATI's cards seem to come out six months too late. I hate SLI and CrossFire altogether. Any and all hopes towards "performance per watt" have been shot to hell no thanks to the GPU industry.

I'm not blaming Nvidia for ATI's current shape, because, by all charts, Nvidia has been ahead of ATI for years now, financially speaking, and both companies are not stupid. I reiterate. These are companies that make billions of dollars yearly. I'm fairly certain ATI's problem is it's position, financially, as compared to Nvidia's. Nvidia has more money. ATI does not. This plays a big role in effectively deciding when products get out of the research and development phase, and into the production phase. ATI has also endured a slew of lawsuits over the past few years, all of which may very well be it's own doing, but merely the case is there.

"...You cannot blame one company's poor performance on anyone but themselves..."

I'm glad to hear it. Wanna come and root for Intel with me then?

I can't believe you guys are still going. You can't agree. Give up. Yawn. . . .

Its good to see you've finally come around. My comments were not intended to slander you as much as show you exactly how your comments were coming off.

My point is not to say ATi sucks or that Nvidia rules. You were continuing to make comments that suggested that ATi was a hapless victim against a juggernaut Nvidia that was raping and pillaging a market that was rightfully ATi's. You also seemed to be insinuating that somehow the market is forced into buying Nvidia products, specifically SLi. You also suggested that at some point we'll all be forced into buying these superfluous technologies of Nvidias which is just downright ridiculous.

The point here is that brand loyalty *must* take a back seat to objectivity in the mind of any reasonable person. I had bought an FX5900 some time ago, and when I saw how well the 9700/9800s were performing against it, I told myself that if Nvidia's next gen products weren't up to par, I'd switch to ATi. My loyalties are to performance per dollar first, and brand loyalty second. Nvidia's 6000 series was good enough to convince me to 'stay in the fold' and I'm happy with my 6800GT and 6600GT. Both do what I need them to do well, though I know they are not the best performing cards around.

If R520 proves to be significantly better than the 7000 series from Nvidia, and the cost is reasonable and comparable, I'd be willing to switch.

My main concern with you, my friend, is that you seem to be completely blinded by brand loyalty and have no objectivity whatsoever. Everyone makes mistakes. Nvidia has made some big ones in the past. ATi has been making some lately. No one minds if you are still loyal to ATi, but you must admit to their failures when they spring up, just as Nvidia folks must own up to Nvidia's gaffes.

I don't really understand your point about hooting for Intel. If you're comparing Intel/AMD to Nvidia/ATi thats not a good comparison. Intel's products are inferior to AMD, dollar for dollar. They have been for some time. They run hotter, are slower in almost all applications, and generally cost more for the same performance. This is not true between Nvidia/ATi who generally have products that cost about the same and offer similar performance (within a given generation).

"...You were continuing to make comments that suggested that ATi was a hapless victim against a juggernaut Nvidia that was raping and pillaging a market that was rightfully ATi's..."

I was arguing that I believe SLI was a poor decision on the part of Nvidia, and that ATI followed suit merely out of competitive reasons. As Sander himself has noted, ATI's general outlook on the dual-GPU solution was that it was going to be an under-profitable market.

Unfortunately, Nvidia did launch SLI, and it was far more profitable than ATI had imagined. My point is, I don't think we'd have seen dual GPU solutions for a while had not Nvidia developed it.

Once again, my opinions on SLI and CrossFire have been expressed. It's a concept that I feel is gaining too much popularity for the overall benefit of the computing world. Where once, laptops were roughly comparable to desktops in gaming, they are now far behind in certain scenarios. In other scenarios, you don't even get any added performance but the card still sucks power, and still takes up motherboard real estate. Also, the idea of a PPU has been hailed as the greatest gaming advance since the GPU, now where the hell are we going to put it? Finally, it is merely getting worse. Gigabyte recently unveiled an SLI system which had 4 PCI-E slots, and 4 7800 GTX's.

As far as I know, you have yet to refute these arguments, and as such, I still shall hold to them.

"...I don't really understand your point about hooting for Intel. If you're comparing Intel/AMD to Nvidia/ATi thats not a good comparison..."

Actually, it's a very simple concept. I'm not blaming Nvidia for ATI's current standpoint, financially. I'm blaming Nvidia for SLI. I was merely using an example on how many people stand with AMD, on the basis that Intel has put AMD in it's current fiscal "crisis."

"... Intel's products are inferior to AMD, dollar for dollar. They have been for some time..."

As I can recall, a 3.0 GHz Pentium 4 will mop the floor with a 3200+ in just about anything but gaming. AMD didn't get a lead until the FX-55 and the 4000+... and then they sort of "sealed" their victory for quite some time with the X2 series.

Good lord man - the Athlon XP has been dead for how long? The Athlon 64 architecture was released years ago. In fact, its difficult to even find many of these CPUs now as even the Semprons are based on Athlon64 architecture.

So I guess you could go back and say that the P3 was better than the 5x86 by AMD but thats not really proving anything.

As far as blaming Nvidia for SLi and its affects on the number of available slots in your system... why would you buy an SLI board if you never planned on using it? I have a Dell Poweredge server that has a PCI-e x8 slot - what the hell am I going to do with that? Nothing. But I knew I wouldn't use it for anything. Most motherboards these days only have one or two PCI-e x1 slots, even those with only a single PCI-e x16 connector. So, having a superfluous slot is not only up to the buyer, but isn't an "either/or" situation. I've yet to see a board that replaces a PCI-e x1 slot with an x16 for a second GPU.

Besides, the PPU card by AGEIA is PCI based, not PCI-e. My Asus A8N-SLI has plenty of standard PCI slots. So does my nForce 3 Giga-byte mobo.

I think before you get all fired up about this stuff you should research it a little more. If customers didn't want SLI, it would be a colossal failure. As it is, its still a niche product. No one is starving for PCI-e slots because, quite frankly, there are hardly any devices that use the new interface. Creative's new soundcard and the upcoming PPU card both use standard PCI slots, which all nforce mobos I've seen have en masse.

"Besides, the PPU card by AGEIA is PCI based, not PCI-e. My Asus A8N-SLI has plenty of standard PCI slots. So does my nForce 3 Giga-byte mobo."

- Don't get your hopes high on PPU card by AGEIA...the amount of transistors on Nvidia & ATI cards are approaching half a billion. I've seen the picture AGEIA's PPU, it doesn't look to me promising at all, although I wouldn't say its a bad approach, but, its not going to be 'so-great'.

yall are fools for talkin about the PPU, that board will come in 2 flavors, PCI and PCI Express.

Everything I've seen has said it will initially be a PCI part, with a PCI-e version expected months later.

"...Good lord man - the Athlon XP has been dead for how long? The Athlon 64 architecture was released years ago. In fact, its difficult to even find many of these CPUs now as even the Semprons are based on Athlon64 architecture...."

If you weren't aware, become aware now. There is an Athlon64 3200+ which generally finds it's anemic self far behind it's Pentium 4 3.0 GHz counterpart in just about every benchmark except gaming.

"...As far as blaming Nvidia for SLi and its affects on the number of available slots in your system... why would you buy an SLI board if you never planned on using it?"

I haven't bought an SLI board, nor do I ever plan on using it... simply because of the fact that I don't want a system whose dual GPU setup consumes an inordinate amount of power for performance that will show up every once in a while. In addition to that, I don't feel like I want to pay for that, but hey, due to it's popularity, I may not be able to play later games.

"...I think before you get all fired up about this stuff you should research it a little more. If customers didn't want SLI, it would be a colossal failure..."

Unfortunately, they do want SLI. Once again, I've never said it was a bad business decision, quite the contrary, in fact. Frankly, Nvidia counted on people's ridiculous "need" for speed. Once again, I find Nvidia's SLI to be a carrot dangling in front of the horse -- for some reason, people just gotta have it, and that mentality is what Nvidia's sales have added to. I was once able to buy a motherboard with an AGP or a PCI-E slot, and then choose my graphics card. A dual PCI-E motherboard now requires dedicating one's self to a specific-brand video card now.

"...yall are fools for talkin about the PPU, that board will come in 2 flavors, PCI and PCI Express..."

The man speaks the truth, and I stand partially corrected.

Comparing a P4 3.0 GHz with dual channel DDR to an Athlon64 754 proc is hardly an apples to apples comparison. However, if you'd like to compare it...

http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleid=1469&page=14

SuperPi is hardly a "gaming benchmark." Additionally, I'd like to point out that as of right now, that space heater P4 3 GHz goes for $241 versus the Athlon64 754 at $145.

EDIT: You may not have specifically said that you had purchased an SLi mobo, but you insinuated that had you purchased such a mobo, you'd be wondering what to do with your extra x16 slot and that you'd be short a slot for PCI/PCIe cards like our Ageia PPU. My point was simply that there is a plethora of non-SLI mobos for both Intel and AMD which do not feature SLi, so thats a moot point.

Second Edit: I just noticed I was reading the above comparison incorrectly. They are actually comparing a socket 754 (single channel DDR) Athlon64 3200 to a P4 3.2 GHz, not a P4 3.0 GHz. So, I find it rather hard to believe Pickle's assertion that the "anemic" Athlon64 3200 gets beaten by a mere P4 3 GHz.

Well, the P4 3.0GHz handily beats the Athlon 64 3200+, just not in this universe I'm afraid.

"...Comparing a P4 3.0 GHz with dual channel DDR to an Athlon64 754 proc is hardly an apples to apples comparison. However, if you'd like to compare it..."

There are socket 939 Athlon64's out there, including the 3000+ and the 3200+. AMD's numbering system goes as such that a 3000+ is the "equivalent" of a 3.0 GHz Pentium 4. As far as benchmarks go, however, a 3.0 GHz Pentium 4 gets appreciable frame rates in gaming, while thoroughly trouncing the Athlon64 in just about everything else.

http://techreport.com/reviews/2004q1/pentium4-3.4ghz/index.x?pg=1

http://www23.tomshardware.com/index.html

",,,SuperPi is hardly a "gaming benchmark.""

This is true, and neither is ScienceMark, both of which AMD's excel in, a fact benchmarkers are well aware of due to the Athlon64's floating point unit. In the SiSoft Sandra benchmark, the Pentium 4 would have kicked the Athlon64's obnoxious ass in both the multimedia and CPU tests. Too bad it wasn't there for some reason...

What this benchmark seemed to lack was a few simple other tests. Like 3D Studio Max. Or Adobe Premiere. Maybe some DivX, WME, and Xvid encoding would be in order, as well. Unfortunately, see, the Pentium 4 would have TRASHED the Athlon64 and sent it home crying.

And no, according to Newegg.com, the Pentium 4 630 is $178.91, and the Athlon64 3200+ is $190.00. If I had $241, I would buy a Pentium D 820, an opponent to whom the Athlon64 could not stand against. Never once did I specify that an Athlon64 with only a single channel of memory transfer should be benchmarked, by all means, bring in the family.

Its a well known fact that video editing and encoding favor Intel based on its higher operating frequencies. No one disputes that. However, if you're not going to be doing this in a professional manner, I haven't seen a single site that recommends Intel over AMD for anything other than those tasks. Additionally, the super cheap dual core P4s do well for general applications but also aren't as well suited for gaming as their single core counterparts from AMD.

And, since the "enthusiast" market is comprised primarily of gamers (what other enthusiast market is there?) then gaming is where its at, and thats where AMD trumps Intel. I think its fairly obvious to everyone reading that your views here have been thoroughly discredited. The fact that AMD has led Intel in gaming performance and value ever since Athlon64 released is just that - a fact. Not even the most heavily Intel-biased sites would try to refute it.

Its good to see that theres at least one Intel fanboy out there still, though.

I'm pretty much done at this point. You have no support, and your claims are 90% marketspeak from your boys at Intel and ATi. Whatever makes you happy, man.

"...I think its fairly obvious to everyone reading that your views here have been thoroughly discredited. The fact that AMD has led Intel in gaming performance and value ever since Athlon64 released is just that - a fact..."

It is. I enjoy gaming, myself. Given $200 with which to purchase a new processor, I would, in a heartbeat, purchase a Pentium 4 at 3.0 GHz. I know an Athlon64 3000+ would beat my computer in Half-Life 2, given the equivalent video card. But, I get between 40 and 140 FPS on a full Half-Life 2: Deathmatch server, I get about that in Half-Life 2.

In all reality, one cannot SEE the difference between what an Athlon64 3200+ would get between what a Pentium 4 at 3.00 GHz would get. However, when exporting a video from Adobe Premeire Elements, my computer would finish a solid 20-30 seconds sooner.

Frankly, it's downright stupid to purchase a processor under the flag of gaming only. Computers happen to be capable of so much more than just games. I do 3D Animation and Video Editing on my computer as well as an occasional game or two.

I will also admit that, given $500 with which to buy a processor, I wouldn't go out and buy a Pentium D. Much as I would hate to join the ranks of the AMD fanboys, I would buy an X2. There's no dispute... it's a better processor.

"...Not even the most heavily Intel-biased sites would try to refute it..."

Most of 'em don't. I don't. As I clearly stated, the Athlon64 will beat the Pentium 4 in gaming. Scientific calculations on the Athlon64 will go much faster than on a Pentium 4, but I don't do much of that. Most people don't do much of that... and if they do, it's with either a supercomputer, or a network of computers that are simply turned on and left to cogitate.

The Pentium 4 led a good life, in my humble opinion. It was a good design, and frankly, it was older than the Athlon64, so... it's to be expected that it's obsolesence would come sooner than the Athlon64. I'm glad to have owned one.

"...Its good to see that theres at least one Intel fanboy out there still, though..."

Yeah, it's kind of a pity. There should be more of them so as to combat the legions of obnoxious, factless, loud-mouthed AMD fanboys out there.

"...I'm pretty much done at this point. You have no support, and your claims are 90% marketspeak from your boys at Intel and ATi. Whatever makes you happy, man...."

If you think I had no support, then please check Newegg and tell me if you can find a 3.0 GHz Pentium 4 for $241. Then try checking those links that I so kindly provided for you.

"...Well, the P4 3.0GHz handily beats the Athlon 64 3200+, just not in this universe I'm afraid...."

The Hardware Analysis universe? Oh, heh. That IS silly of me to think such a thing, after all, an Athlon64 2800+ with a piece of paper in the AGP slot will beat ANYTHING it's put up against. Especially if it's an Nvidia piece of paper.

Speaking of paper.

Reward if Found: ATi Crossfire

http://voodoopc.blogspot.com/2005/10/reward-if-found-ati-crossfire.html

ATI's CrossFire: MIA

http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=171

ATI CrossFire MIA:

http://www.hardocp.com/index.html

You guys are freaks - seriously.