Introduction

ATI, the company that is most known of their powerful and quality graphic card solutions, released their first Crossfire mainboard chipset with the RD480. Today they present the new RD580 chipset. So let's take a look what the new chipset has to offer.

Naming

Most of you already heard about "RD580" which is a sequence to RD480. The D stands for "Dual" PCI-Express video card slots. There are no plans to have an RS580 (integrated VGA) or RX580 (only one video card slot).

If you talk to the chipset development team at ATI everybody just calls RD580 by the name "Skeletor". Maybe you played with Masters of the Universe "He-Man" toys as a child. Then you probably remember Skeletor as the arch-enemy of the hero He-Man. Previous chipsets had engineering names like "Metallo" and "Superman". Guess you can imagine what ATI chipset gurus were interested in when they were young.

As marketing name ATI picked "ATI Crossfire XPRESS3200". The 32 obviously stands for the 32 available graphics lanes. Sixteen lanes for every video card no matter if running with one video card or in Crossfire mode.