- Monday, 23 November 2009
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The difference between [the P4] and the [Athlon] die size is frigging huge - AMD's Jerry Sanders III
Nvidia SLI coming to P55 motherboards
NVIDIA HAS ANNOUNCED that upcoming P55 chipset-based motherboards for the Intel Core i7 and i5 CPUs will be able to run its Scalable Link Interface technology - the equivalent of AMD's Crossfire multi-graphics card set-up - legally and without any need for cracking or hacking.
The firm has licensed SLI for use on the new Intel chipset-based motherboards, due to hit the streets September.
Previously, the Intel X58 was the first chipset to grant full use of SLI capabilities where other motherboards weren't so lucky. Although the cards could be physically plugged into the motherboards, they just couldn't harness the power of multiple graphics cards on one screen and had to make do with them driving separate screens instead.
Older chipsets such as the X38, X48 and P45 are all left out in the cold as Nvidia didn't like to play nicely with the big boys and those chipsets couldn't run SLI cards in the best possible way.
Or can they? It's come to our attention that some bright spark figured out a way to get SLI working with X38 chipsets, read all about it here.
The likes of Asus and Msi will soon be able to boast about full SLI prowess coming to their P55 motherboards, as these have now been licensed to use the technology. µ
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"Previously, the Intel X58 was the first chipset to grant full use of SLI capabilities where other motherboards weren't so lucky. Although the cards could be physically plugged into the motherboards, they just couldn't harness the power of multiple graphics cards on one screen and had to make do with them driving separate screens instead."
Dear dear sir,
Have you been near a videocard these last years? First of all, X58 is not the first chipset to have support for SLI, it's the first non-reVidia chipset to do so.
Second, couldn't harness the power? Wait, what? They are capable of running two 4870x2 cards, but not two 8600GT's? It's a simple matter of licensing and since reVidia has no Nehalem chipset, they are scared all the potential SLI customers are going to run to ATI instead.
If this was somehow satire, please find something funnier to say, i'm sure there's better stabs to be had at reVidia for this...
Even if you think it's funny, not all your readers know the statement that the motherboards aren't fast enough is false.
There have been SLI hacks before, but only for ancient driver releases. Given that I have a 975X based board, it's not actually that slower than fancy new boards, as it sports two 8x PCI-e 1.0 slots.. SLI ran fine on the old hacked driver version, but the fact you couldn't run multi monitor *and* SLI made it fairly useless at the time.
Nvidia in "Give us cash or we break your toys" spat?
The only thing stopping SLI on other boards is the drivers. ATI's Crossfire works fine. Nvidia just wants money out of the chipset and motherboard people.
5% of gamers use SLI. Thats not a whole lot of ppl folks. Go get a fast single GPU card and call it quits.