Original Link: https://www.anandtech.com/show/3206

The timing was a bit off

by Anand Lal Shimpi on July 22, 2005 8:57 AM EST


I had it all planned out, my last blog would go live before the weekend and then on Monday morning you'd be hit with a barrage of CrossFire benchmarks. But I guess this is one of the problems of dealing with pre-release hardware, it rarely works perfectly on the first (second, third or fourth) try, and it always gives you a tough time when you need it to cooperate most. Derek and Wes spent a lot of time debugging the issues with the platform, finally after a few days of despair they managed to get the system working and producing reliable results. So check out Derek's preview here.

As I alluded to in my last post, CrossFire is great and all, but with no R520 it's pretty much yesterday's news at this point. ATI isn't the only company to have botched up the execution of a product; if you'll remember back to NVIDIA's nForce launch, the chipset shipped several months after their initial Computex launch, but they haven't repeated the catastrophe in such magnitude since. If ATI is to be taken seriously as a chipset maker, this can't be the way they launch products like CrossFire. There's more to talk about on the chipset/motherboard side of CrossFire, but I'll let Wes address that next week.

I've been playing with Gigabyte's i-RAM all week and I've had the review done, except for a handful of questions that needed answering from GB's engineering. I just got those answers at around 3AM so I'm going to work on putting the final touches on this piece over the weekend, to go live Monday morning. It's an interesting little card but I don't want to spoil it for you all so I'm going to do that new paragraph thing right about...

This weekend there's a retirement party for my aunt (she's actually a new aunt, picked her up during the whole marrying into a new family deal) so sometime today Vinney and I are going to head down to NJ to kick off the weekend. It should be a lot of fun, especially since the last time (and the first time really) I saw most of these folks was at/around our wedding last August.

Now it's time to do the whole cooking for sustenance thing, have a great weekend folks :)

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