Friday 7th September 2007

HP offers CrossFire on nForce SLI motherboard

Posted at: 12:17pm 7th September 2007 by Ben Hardwidge

‘Voodoo magic’ is the key to getting arch rival’s dual GPU technology working on Asus Striker motherboard

It might sound as likely as Tom Waits joining Girls Aloud, but HP has somehow managed to get AMD’s CrossFire technology working on an Nvidia nForce 680i SLI motherboard, and it will even be offering the feature with its new Blackbird 002 PC.

In a revealing interview with Custom PC, HP Gaming’s chief technologist, Rahul Sood, said: ‘What’s really cool is that we’re only using the nForce chipset for Intel, because it’s the best chipset, but we’re also giving the choice of CrossFire or SLI on it.’

Sood wouldn’t reveal how the feat was achieved, putting it merely down to ‘Voodoo magic,’ but said that they just had to work with their partners to ‘make it happen.’ When asked what Nvidia thinks of all this, Sood replied ‘You know, that’s a very good question! If I could look at the face of my Nvidia ref right now and see what he was thinking, I’d probably say that he gets it. I think Nvidia understands that Blackbird is a game-changing system.’

HP claims that the move is a part of being ‘component-agnostic,’ as gamers aren’t bothered about what brand of component they have, as long as it does the job. ‘Customers don’t really care about whether they have CrossFire or SLI,’ said Sood, ‘what they care about is how that game is going to look, how easy will it be to play – they care about the visual quality.’

For this reason, HP plans to offer a wide range of configuration options for the Blackbird, and will put no stickers, other than the HP logo, on the outside of the box. For more information, read the full interview here.

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Comments

What was your point da_Geek?

What exactly was your point da_Geek? I never said "everyting" was crap I said Nvidia chipsets and Asus motherboards were!? You say stable chipsets like Intel and Via chipsets suck and SIS is solid but slow!? Intel chipsets are the most stable period, and Via chipsets are almost as good, SIS chipsets are fast but run to hot (the first Xbox 360 recalls confirming this) so they burn out faster, ATI chipset boards are rare (haven't worked on one yet) and Nvidia chipsets are buggy and prone to early death (have RA'd many dead Nvidia chipset motherboards)! Then at the end da_Geek you say that an AMD 3.0GHz Barcelona with 2 x HD2900XTs in Crossfire broke 30K points in 3DMark...okay if that is true fair enough! But wait a second if that was a Barcelona Motherboard running Crossfire then it wouldn't be running an Nvidia chipset because as you say you can't run Crossfire on Nvidia chipsets until now so I'm guessing it was an ATI Chipset and I wasn't dissing ATI Chipsets only Nvidia chipsets and Asus motherboards! So what is your point?

Comment by Fridgemusa at 3:04am 13th October 2007

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what a bunch of morons....

Nobody understands the breakthrough of this. No one has been able to get ATI crossfire to run on an SLI chipset before. Also If you dont have the "bad " nvidia chipset what are u going to use... ur options are ATI , SiS, Via, And Intel... Ati's are good but do not perform as well as nvidias, Sis is solid but slow, via and intel just Suck, except for Intels X38 but who wants DDR3 come on.... I DO build my own Pc and I have a Nvidia chipset and an HD2600xt. So for the unresearched among you What Rig setup broke 30k 3dmark points. was it a 8800 ultra in SLI with a 5.4ghz kentsfield? NOPE it was a 3 Ghz Amd barcelona with 2 ATI 2900XT s in Crossfire. Point is before you call everyting crap... get your facts straight.

Comment by da_Geek at 3:09am 19th September 2007

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I agree about the Nvidia chipset!!!

Hey if crappy Asus motherboards with even crappier Nvidia chipsets are what floats your boat then by all means waste your money, but your gonna be crying when the board shits itself after the warranty period runs out LOL! Don't believe me then type in "Asus shit" or "Nvidia chipset problems" into any search engine and have a good read before you waste your money! If you want a kick-arse gaming system go see your local computer shop or build it yourself! P.S. They are probly just using Asus PEG-Link or a bridge chip for Crossfire support no big secret there!

Comment by Fridgemusa at 3:22pm 12th September 2007

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I agree about the Nvidia chipset!!!

Comment by Fridgemusa at 3:14pm 12th September 2007

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I agree about the Nvidia chipset!!!

Comment by Fridgemusa at 3:14pm 12th September 2007

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ma11y1

what! why would anyone want to stick in crossfire ati series hd 2xxx cards in the first place? the cards dont live up to what amd said they could do, they consume so much power thats on 1 never mind crossfire!! mind you i can see the possibilitys with this "voodoo" tech gives people choices instead of having to buy an amd mobo crossfire or an intel nvidea chipset to play sli wouldnt mind seeing sum benchmarks to compair the matters of having either one or the other card series on board?

Comment by ma11y1 at 11:45am 10th September 2007

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insane

why would you want to run crappy crossfire on a crappy, most unstable chipset ever made?

Comment by fgdgfd1 at 6:09pm 7th September 2007

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