Review: ATI Sturgeon CrossFire Xpress 3200 AM2 reference board

by James Smith on 30 August 2006, 08:47

Tags: ATi Technologies (NYSE:AMD)

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Specification



Board Feature Implementation
Northbridge ATI CrossFire Xpress 3200
Southbridge ATI SB600
Processor Support All AMD Socket AM2 microprocessors including:
AMD Athlon 64 FX
AMD Athlon 64 X2
AMD Athlon 64
AMD Sempron
Memory Support DDR2-400/533/667/800
8GiB max via 4 slots
Graphics Support PCI Express
2 PEG16X slots
ATI CrossFire
PCI Express 2 x PCIe X1 slots
PCI Conventional 1 x PCI 2.3 slots
Networking Marvell 88E8052 Gigabit Ethernet on PCIe
FireWire VIA 1394a controller on PCI
3 FW400 ports
Audio Realtek ALC880; HD Audio, 8-channel (7.1)
Jack sensing
USB ATI SB600; 10 ports USB 2.0
Disk Support ATI SB600; 4 SATA300, 1 ATA133 IDE, RAID0,1,0+1
2x Sil3132; 2 SATA300 each

If it weren't for the inclusion of the SB600, the Sturgeon reference board's specification would look decidedly ordinary as far as enthusiast-class mainboards go. However, the use of SB600 brings ATI's brand-new AHCI SATA2 disk controller with 4 ports, along with a new USB2.0 controller implementation that banishes the performance demons present in SB450/460 and increases port count to 10 (up from 8).

While SB600 doesn't integrate an Ethernet controller, ATI arguing that a PHY for an on-board MAC is almost as expensive as a full chip that does the lot, and as such doesn't quite implement the raft of features that NVIDIA's new MCP55 (nForce 5) does. The support for PCI Express means that's largely moot if the board designed that uses SB600 is smart, and marketing doesn't shave off add-in features provided by external ICs, for the sake of a few dollars' saving.

Only a single GigE controller and lack of digital audio output give us cause for concern on the feature set side of things. It's fully-featured elsewhere though, with all SATA2 ports on the SB600 disk controller and dual Sil3132s having physical ports on the board, and RD580 itself well known by now for its single-chip dual PEG16X CrossFire implementation, overclocking prowess and general performance.