CrossFire Xpress 3200: RD580 for AM2
by Wesley Fink on June 1, 2006 12:05 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
It will be several weeks until ATI AM2 retail motherboards are available. As a result ATI AM2 testing is confined to the ATI "Sturgeon" reference board. Somebody at ATI Engineering is apparently a fisherman, since all the recent ATI reference boards have carried fish names during development.
Whatever the reasons for ATI's delay in launching chipsets for retail ATI AM2 boards, ATI is not in a very good market position at AM2 launch. With the RD580 arriving months later than expected, at the end of socket 939 development, we really expected RD580 AM2 to be quickly out the gate. Instead NVIDIA has retail AM2 boards available from a host of manufacturers at AM2 launch and ATI is sampling a reference board.
As discussed in past reviews, reference boards are a breed apart. They are designed for manufacturer qualification, and rarely see the light of day in the retail market. The ATI reference boards are a bit different since Sapphire has marketed reference boards under their own brand name in the past. They are expected to do the same with Sturgeon.
Since the ATI CrossFire Xpress 3200 AM2 was designed for qualification, not much time will be spent on layout. Features, other than integrated chipset features, will not be an overriding concern. Additional features can be selected by manufacturers based on their intended market and price point.
Some notes from using the reference board. Loaded with X1900 CrossFire, there are still 2 usable PCIe x1 slots. However, there is no usable PCI slot if CrossFire is installed. Since users who spend over $1000 for video will likely want to use a standalone audio card, this would be a real issue in a retail board. Similarly, with CrossFire installed, the CMOS jumper is hidden under a video card with X1900 XT cards. ATI did users a great service in making dual-channel memory occupy alternate DIMM slots. This provides for much easier cooling of DDR2 DIMMs, which can become very hot when pushing for fastest memory timings.
Basic Features
Reference boards are used mainly for qualification and development by board partners. As a result you will generally see very extensive BIOS options that may or may not appear on retail motherboards. An option of particular interest is the DQS Signal Training option which replaces a wide range of manual DQS skewing options for both memory channels. This worked well in our testing, and made it much simpler to accomodate different memory on this board than the manual skewing controls seen on some other Enthusiast boards.
ATI has aimed their discrete chipset AMD boards squarely at the computer enthusiast. This clearly continues with the CrossFire Xpress 3200 AM2. The range of options and features is the best so far on any ATI motherboard for AMD. This pays off in the tweaking options and performance of the new ATI RD580 AM2.
Whatever the reasons for ATI's delay in launching chipsets for retail ATI AM2 boards, ATI is not in a very good market position at AM2 launch. With the RD580 arriving months later than expected, at the end of socket 939 development, we really expected RD580 AM2 to be quickly out the gate. Instead NVIDIA has retail AM2 boards available from a host of manufacturers at AM2 launch and ATI is sampling a reference board.
As discussed in past reviews, reference boards are a breed apart. They are designed for manufacturer qualification, and rarely see the light of day in the retail market. The ATI reference boards are a bit different since Sapphire has marketed reference boards under their own brand name in the past. They are expected to do the same with Sturgeon.
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| Click to enlarge |
Since the ATI CrossFire Xpress 3200 AM2 was designed for qualification, not much time will be spent on layout. Features, other than integrated chipset features, will not be an overriding concern. Additional features can be selected by manufacturers based on their intended market and price point.
Some notes from using the reference board. Loaded with X1900 CrossFire, there are still 2 usable PCIe x1 slots. However, there is no usable PCI slot if CrossFire is installed. Since users who spend over $1000 for video will likely want to use a standalone audio card, this would be a real issue in a retail board. Similarly, with CrossFire installed, the CMOS jumper is hidden under a video card with X1900 XT cards. ATI did users a great service in making dual-channel memory occupy alternate DIMM slots. This provides for much easier cooling of DDR2 DIMMs, which can become very hot when pushing for fastest memory timings.
Basic Features
| ATI CrossFire Xpress 3200 AM2 | |
| CPU Interface | Socket AM2 |
| Chipset | ATI RD580 Northbridge - ATI SB600 Southbridge |
| Bus Speeds | 200 to 400 in 1MHz Increments |
| Memory Speeds | DDR2 at 400, 533, 667, 800 |
| PCIe Speeds | 100 to 200 in 1MHz Increments |
| PCI/AGP | Fixed at 33/66 |
| Core Voltage | Auto, 0.8V to 1.45V in 0.025V increments |
| CPU PWM Level | 1 to 25 in 1 increments |
| VTT PWM Level | 0.807v to 1.149v in .007v to .014v increments |
| CPU Clock Multiplier | 4x-25x in 1X increments |
| DRAM Voltage | 1.541V to 2.804V in .05v increments |
| HyperTransport Frequency | 1000MHz (1GHz) (Stable in overclocking to 1500+ HT) |
| HyperTransport Multiplier | Auto, 1X to 5X |
| RD580 HT Drive Strength | Auto, Optimal |
| HT Receiver Comp. Ctrl | Auto, Optimal |
| RD580 HT PLL Speed | Auto, High Speed, Low Speed |
| Radeon Xpress (NB) Voltage | 1.143v, 1.201v, 1.260v, 1.299v, 1.348v, 1.406v, 1.455v, 1.504v |
| HT Link Voltage | 1.143v, 1.201v, 1.260v, 1.299v, 1.348v, 1.406v, 1.455v, 1.504v |
| PCIe 1.2 Voltage | 1.143v, 1.201v, 1.260v, 1.299v, 1.348v, 1.406v, 1.455v, 1.504v |
| SB Voltage | 1.143v, 1.201v, 1.260v, 1.299v, 1.348v, 1.406v, 1.455v, 1.504v |
| GFX1/2 (PCIe) Link Width | X16, X8, X4, X2, X1 |
| GFX and/or SB Payload | 64, 32, or 16 Bytes |
| GFX PCIe Link ASPM | Disabled, L0, L1, L0 & L1 |
| GPP PCIe Link ASPM | Disabled, L0, L1, L0 & L1 |
| GFX 0 and/or 1 Slot Power Limit | 0 to 255 watts in 1 watt increments |
| GPP Slot Power Limit | 0 to 255 watts in 1 watt increments |
| AHCP 2.0 (AMD Cool'n'Quiet) | Enabled, Disabled |
| DDR Drive Strength (N) and/or (P) | 0 to 8 in 1 increments |
| DQS Signal Training | Enabled, Disabled |
| Memory Slots | Four 184-pin DDR2 DIMM Slots Dual-Channel Configuration Regular Unbuffered Memory to 4GB Total |
| Expansion Slots | 2 PCIe X16 2 PCIe X1 1 PCI |
| Onboard SATA/RAID | 4 SATA2 Drives by SB600 (RAID 0, 1, 1+0, 10, JBOD) PLUS 4 SATA Drives by 2 Silicon Image 3132 (RAID 0, 1, 0+1, JBOD) |
| Onboard IDE/IDE RAID | One Standard ATA133/100/66 (2 drives) |
| Onboard USB 2.0/IEEE-1394 | 10 USB 2.0 ports supported by SB600 2 Firewire by VIA VT6307 |
| Onboard LAN | PCIe Gigabit by Marvel Yukon 88E8052 PHY |
| Onboard Audio | Azalia HD Audio by Realtek ALC880 codec |
| BIOS Revision | AMI Build 15 - May 30, 2006 |
Reference boards are used mainly for qualification and development by board partners. As a result you will generally see very extensive BIOS options that may or may not appear on retail motherboards. An option of particular interest is the DQS Signal Training option which replaces a wide range of manual DQS skewing options for both memory channels. This worked well in our testing, and made it much simpler to accomodate different memory on this board than the manual skewing controls seen on some other Enthusiast boards.
ATI has aimed their discrete chipset AMD boards squarely at the computer enthusiast. This clearly continues with the CrossFire Xpress 3200 AM2. The range of options and features is the best so far on any ATI motherboard for AMD. This pays off in the tweaking options and performance of the new ATI RD580 AM2.
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Gary Key - Thursday, June 1, 2006 - link
Wes's original hard drive met an untimely death during testing. However, the chart is incorrect as the Maxtor drive has a 16MB cache also and in our IPEAK tests the two drives are very comparable if not the same. We did not see any differences in the game scores and PCMark was off about 20 points, well within the margin of error for testing for this application.