Anyone want to help me understand SLI + Crossfire?

[KJS]

So I'm going to get a 4870, and from what I understand, I need a motherboard that supports Crossfire? Isn't crossfire for optimizing 2 cards together or something? Do I still need it if I only have 1 card?

Just wondering =p

 

[gamerman4]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATI_CrossFire

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scalable_Link_Interface

They are ways to make 2 graphics cards run together to render a game.

It requires two cards so having only one card wouldn't require crossfire.
There is a 4870 X2 that is a single card with 2 GPUs but AFAIK you don't need crossfire for it either.

 

[Archangel]

no, you dont need a crossfire motherboard when you only get 1 card. even better, you could even get a SLI motherboard if you are only going to run 1 card
(like gamerman4 said )

 

[daisymtc]

Crossfire = 2 or more ATI video card running at same time.
Need Mobo support Crossfire, but beware of what speed they supporting as well.
In short:
Intel: X48/ X38 chipset
AMD: 790FX chipset

 

[Tuffie]

I'll just quickly say one thing that hasn't been covered.

Quote taken from http://www.driverheaven.net/articles/crossfire/

Q. What is the difference between SLI and CrossFire?
A. The principal differences between nVidia’s SLI system and ATI’s CrossFire are:
-CrossFire can enable multi-GPU rendering on all applications. SLI only works on selected applications identified in nVidia’s driver.
-CrossFire supports more rendering modes than SLI. Supertiling offers good performance and evenly distributes the workload between the two GPUs. CrossFire can use multiple GPUs to improve image quality rather than performance with SuperAA modes. Supertiling and SuperAA modes are only supported on the CrossFire platform, not SLI.
-CrossFire is an open platform that supports multiple chipsets and a wide variety of graphics cards m

Although it seems kinda funny that, I'm posting something that's putting SLI down, as I'm an Nvida fanboy.