ATI’s Reference Crossfire Motherboard::

Here in all its glory is ATI’s reference design for the Crossfire Platform AMD socket 939.

As you can see from the above pictures it doesn’t differ very much from many of the retail motherboards you can buy on the market today.

Features of note are the inclusion of two SATA controllers, one of which is included on the Southbridge (control the 4 sata ports on the right of the board) and the other is an external Silicon Image 3x12 controller which control the 2 plugs at the base of the board.

Obviously you have 2 PCIe 16x slots on the board. The lower slot is slot 0 and the higher one is slot 1. Directly above them is a power connector for additional power to the board/cards which ensures stability when running in dual mode. One thing we dont like about the slot arrangement on the reference board is the lack of PCIe 1x slots to use when you’re not running dual cards. Additionally due to the Master slot being the lower of the two 16x slots you end up losing at least 1 of the normal PCI slots if you use a dual slot cooled card.

Those of you who are familiar with SLI will notice that the crossfire board doesn’t feature a lane directing riser card between the 2 graphics card slots (small PCB which depending on how it is connected changes the board from 2xPCIe 8x mode to 1x PCIe 16x mode). The reference ATI board features a similar device which is plugged into PCIe slot 1 when you only have a single card installed, however this wont be required for retail boards from ATI partners.