NEWS: ATI announces dual x16 Crossfire 3200 chipset

ATI today officially introduced its Crossfire 3200 chipset, which was formerly code-named RD580. The dual-graphics chipset offers two x16 PCI Express slots and allows users to install two graphics cards without the need for a master/slave configuration, as it is the case with the Xpress 200 version.

The first review can be found on Bit-Tech, HardOCP, HotHardware, PCPerspective, RegHardware and Sudhian.

HardOCP: As to the ATI Radeon Xpress 3200 chipset it self, I have to say that it was everything I hoped it would be. It is a feature-rich solution worthy of any gaming machine and is very much competitive with other solutions on the market both in terms of features, technology, and certainly performance. The ATI Radeon Xpress 3200 is a highly overclockable performance powerhouse. It would seem ATI has improved on the Xpress 200 in nearly every way. The ASUS A8R32-MVP Deluxe is a motherboard I can finally recommend to would-be Crossfire users. Even those who might not be interested in dual video solutions will find this a truly feature-rich and viable alternative to NVIDIA nForce 4 chipsets for the AMD platform. With a pair of X1900XTX's in CrossFire configuration, you can rest assured you'll have the one of the fastest gaming systems money can buy.

HotHardware: ATI is on the right track with the CrossFire Xpress 3200 chipset. Performance is competitive with its main competition, and although this is a new and inherently immature product, the Asus motherboard we tested that was based on it, remained rock-solid stable throughout all of our testing. In combination with the ULi 1575 southbridge, the chipset as a whole offers a very complete feature set that includes true dual PCI Express x16 slots for full bandwidth CrossFire support, SATA 3.0Gb/s RAID support and HD audio. In addition, the chipset also seems to have a plenty of "headroom" left, as is evident by our excellent overclocking results. One potential issue that could affect adoption of the CrossFire Xpress 3200 has to do with NVIDIA, however. NVIDIA recently acquired ULi, and we doubt they'll be too keen on supplying 1575s to ATI's partners for use on CrossFire Xpress 3200 boards much longer. ATI's own SB450 southbridge is still an option, but that product's relatively poor USB performance and its lack of SATA 3.0Gb/s support limit its appeal in the enthusiast community.

PCPerspective: There is simply no getting around that the Asus A8R32-MVP is probably the best overclocking motherboard I have ever tested. And since this is the first XPress 3200 chipset I have tested as well, both ATI and Asus can share the spotlight on that. The ATI engineers told us they built the ability to do these kinds of overclocking feats into the chipset. So once new BIOS are released and other board vendors start competing for the top spot I am sure well see the overclocking number soar even higher.