14 DAY TRIAL // As people may or may not have noticed, the Radeon R9 290X graphics adapter lacks a certain element in those press shots we have been provided with.
More specifically, there is no CrossFire bridge port in sight. Normally, it would be on the top edge of the board, but it is absent. The cooler shroud covers the top in totality.
Fortunately, AMD has offered an explanation for this, and DonanimHaber relayed it.
There is a new CrossFireX technology at play here, one that doesn't need that connector anymore.
Instead, it uses the Sideport technology, whereby the GPUs of different cards communicate over PCI Express.
It's all thanks to the PCI Express 3.0 technology. NVIDIA and AMD had the Sideport idea in mind since early times, but the first generation of PCI Express interfaces didn't have a wide enough bandwidth.
