Elitegroup has pledged to ship a budget ATI CrossFire-enabled motherboard for AMD's Athlon 64 X2 dual-core processors by the end of the month.

The RD480-A939 joins ECS' other Socket 939/CrossFire combo mobo, the KA1 MVP. Like the older board, the new model is based on ATI's Radeon Xpress 200-class RD480 North Bridge and SB480 South Bridge chips. The board includes two PCI Express x16 slots for the twin CrossFire graphics cards.

The new board lacks the older model's support for 3Gbps Serial ATA II devices, but can take four 1.5Gbps SATA peripherals and four parallel ATA-66/100/133 units, and supports RAID 0 and 1. The RD480-A939 sports a Realtek Gigabit Ethernet controller feeding a single LAN port. There are four USB 2.0 ports too, along withPS/2, serial and a variety of digital and analogue audio ports all fed by the board's Realtek eight-channel audio chip.

ECS claimed the RD480-A939 offers "enormous overclocking potential". Board owners will be able to "tweak a wide array of settings including memory voltage, CPU core voltage and chipset voltage, among others, to maximise performance", the firm said.

The RD480-A939 will be available in the UK at the end of January, ECS said, priced around £60 including VAT.

AMD this week slashed the prices it charges for its Athlon 64 X2 dual-core processors. ®