AnandTech Exclusive: CrossFire Benchmarks Revealed
 

While CrossFire often provides more performance than the 7800 GTX, we don't get the benefit of SM3.0, which is being used in more and more games. The added cost will either eat into your budget for a next generation card when they come along, or will usurp money that might be better spent on a monitor to handle very high resolutions. There are plenty of examples of CPU limited games at 1600x1200 using CrossFire (basically the same list as the 7800 GTX). As time goes on, it will be important to invest in a monitor or money spent on ultra high end graphics solutions will go to waste.

The bottom line is that CrossFire is a success in implementation. We are impressed with the performance of the solution, especially considering the very early hardware and software that we have our hands on here. When a final solution is released, we will be doing a much more in-depth performance and image quality analysis of the hardware, but at this point, we just want to get a solid idea about what to expect. And right now, we expect exciting things for ATI. To recap performance, we've put together a table showing improvement due to the addition of a second GPU under CrossFire and SLI.

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2477&p=1

will there be a direct availability of a r520 crossfire version too? because nobody seems to mention anything of the like, or will the R520 be single for some months before a R52O crossfire will be released?