We preview the performance potential of the Intel P965 with ATI CrossFire. Is it all it can be? ASUS has released the first production level BIOS that fully enables CrossFire compatibility for their P5B Deluxe motherboard. We have been testing BIOS 0706 for the last week with a beta ATI Catalyst 6.9 driver set. We found the performance to be acceptable when compared directly to the 975X based ASUS P5W-DH Deluxe but it was lacking in certain areas. We tested this BIOS with the official Catalyst 6.9 drivers and while performance and compatibility improved with the official drivers there were still some issues.

The engineers at ASUS continued their round the clock efforts at enhancing the performance and released a beta BIOS to us yesterday. The performance of the 0708 beta BIOS generally resulted in overall performance improvements of 3%~9% in our testing. While both the ATI driver and ASUS BIOS still have room for incremental performance improvements, the initial results we will show today are indicative of this platform combination.

AnandTech