Hello all,

Well, I read that everything past the x1600 could do crossfire without the bridge.

Right now I have an HD 3870 (one from powercolor with an aftermarket zerotherm HSF)
in the primary slot and my old x1900 GT in the slave slot, both are connected to power, and both work. I know this because I hooked a second monitor up to the x1900 and was able to extend my desktop.

My issue is that crossfire isn't showing up in CCC and with ati tray tools, its showing as not supported. I think it *should* be supported as both cards are crossfire ready and the 3870 is supposed to be backwards compatible with older cards.

Can anyone offer any information or a solution for me to get crossfire working? At the very least I'd like to do something besides extended desktop. (not clone, but a setting that would allow me to run a full screen game on one monitor and have diagnostics, monitoring progs, and chat windows up in the other monitor, without triggering a game minimize, basically, running a separate desktop on the x1900 GT.)

I would really appreciate any attention I can get on this matter, I have been googling like crazy for three hours straight. I'm pretty dissapointed I cannot enable crossfire with my new card, since in its day the x1900 GT was the same price and has been a reliable (if outdated) card. I really don't want to throw it away and nobody would want to buy it now.

(Please, no "you should have gotten an 8800 GT." They were all out of stock and the 3870 wasn't a bad buy... it was AVAILABLE)

You cannot run Crossfire, because they are two different cards. In order to run crossfire/SLi you have to have 2 of the exact same card (i.e. 2 X1900GT, or 2 Radeon HD 3870) you cannot mix, they will not work together.

Actually crossfire can use different cards.Let me get the chart.
Compatibility Charts
But if you do crossfire you get the speed of the slower card.

well, going by the chart, the x1900 GT isn't compatible. I guess I'll hold onto it in hopes AMD/ATI does release that driver that allows x1k cards to be used as PPU's.

Ok, marked as answered