Sapphire delivers CrossFire RD580 series motherboards
 

Sapphire Technology has announced two new models for its Pure CrossFire series offering 16x performance on both PCI Express (PCIe) slots in a dual GPU system.

The Pure CrossFire PC-A9RD580 motherboard is based on the latest ATI Technologies CrossFire Xpress 3200 chipset and SB450 southbridge, and it combines support for the AMD Athlon64, FX and dual core processors, the company said.

According to the company, both of the dual PCIe graphics slots on the PC-A9RD580 motherboard provide full 16-lane performance with dual graphics cards and CrossFire modes. The motherboard supports a 2000MT/s HyperTransport interface and up to 4GB of dual channel DDR memory, while BIOS options also allow CPU, bus and memory speeds to be adjusted over a wide range.

An additional PCIe x1 and one standard PCI slot meet the need for expansion, and onboard communications options include Marvell Gigabit LAN and Firewire as well as eight USB 2.0 ports and on-board High Definition Azalia 7.1 8-channel sound. The system also has four SATA-I RAID and four SATA-II RAID connections as well as IDE ATA133 support.

Based on the same architecture, the new Sapphire Pure CrossFire Advantage PC-A9RD580ADV board offers system integrators a solution to a high performance dual graphics system with any AMD Athlon64 series processor. Full dual 16-lane PCIe is again supported, together with two PCIe x1 ports and two PCI slots. On board features include both Gbit and 10/100 LAN, 4×SATA-I plus 2×SATA-II and two ATA133 ports, eight USB 2.0 and one parallel port.