nVidia will enable SLI on Intel motherboards
Posted: 2008-08-31 02:15pm
Link 1
A more interesting bit from Anandtech is this:NVIDIA surprised many today with an announcement form NVISION 08 that it will add support for SLI to the Intel X58 motherboard without having to use the nForce 200 chip.
NVIDIA does maintain that to get maximum bandwidth a motherboard does need to be using its nForce 200 chip. The Intel X58 is the only chipset that will be supported and NVIDIA says it has no plans to support other chipsets without the nForce 200 at this time.
Just buying the X58 chipset and building a board doesn’t allow a manufacturer to enable SLI on the X58. The board has to be certified for manufacturer by NVIDIA before an activation key for SLI will be granted. This will mean that enthusiasts will be able to get both ATI Crossfire support and support for NVIDIA SLI without having to resort to systems like the HP Blackbird that supports both.
AnandTech reports that both two and three cards will work in SLI with the X58. For gamers looking at building a high-end system, the nForce 200 will be required to get the full x16 bandwidth across three slots. Without the nForce 200 the board will only offer dual x16 slots or one x16 and two x8 slots.
Now this could be interesting, wide open competition between SLI and Crossfire on the same motherboard combination.NVIDIA went even further to say that if we were previewing any X58 motherboards that hadn’t yet made it through certification, that it would work with us to get our hands on a driver enabling SLI on the motherboard. It remains to be seen how easy it will be to simply hack in support for SLI on any X58 motherboard, regardless of certification status.