SLI still won't work on Crossfire 2X16 board

BEING IN possession of one of those Asus A8R32-MVP boards with ATI's Xpress 3200 chipset (and an Athlon64 FX-62 overclocked to 2.8GHz with Corsair TwinX 3200XL CL2225 to boot!), I was curious if the chipset's magnificent dual X16 PCI-E links - coming out of a single North Bridge without any latency-adding HT links in between - would provide higher performance for Nvidia SLI setups too, compared to the Nvidian dual-bridge setup linked via HyperTransport.

The (in)famous SLI patch, available for sometime, could help on most boards, especially if using ULi's south bridge (now Nvidian, of course), which is the case with this Asus board. So, I pulled out two simple, slim 7800GTX cards, loaded in both 82.12 and 84.21 Detonator installables just in case, and went ahead to install them on the card, all in correct order. I deliberately didn't use any of the brand new 90-series beta Detonators, as I suspected they would be patch-aware.

Well, to cut the story short, the cards worked fine as one, and as two, in both driver installations, but, despite the SLI patch installation, no such luck to get SLI working at all (or even see an SLI prompt in Advanced Properties tab).

I suspect that Nvidia figured out how to disable it, but even the old 82 series?

At least, here's the 'memento' photo: two Nvidia 7800GTX cards working (but not together) on the top-end Xfire chipset. What a pity!

Nvidia could be more open and let its cards work on this setup too - with ATI's superior north bridge, Nvidians might then be able to earn few more 3DMarks for their own 7950GX2 cards, for instance. Imagine the slogan: "For The Best Quad SLI numbers - Use ATI's X3200 Chipset With Nvidia Cards." µ