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March 20, 2010 1:42 PM CDT
- Date:
- Thursday , August 28, 2008
- Category:
- GPU / Video Cards
- Manufacturers:
- NVIDIA
- Author:
- Kyle Bennett
NVIDIA SLI on Intel X58 Chipset Mobos
You can write pages of editorial about this but what really matters to our readers is this: You will be able to use NVIDIA SLIx2 (x3 and x4 with additional NVIDIA NF200 logic) video card configurations natively on Intel’s upcoming X58 chipset motherboards.
You can write pages of editorial about this but what really matters to our readers is this: You will be able to use NVIDIA SLIx2 (x3 and x4 with additional NVIDIA NF200 logic) video card configurations natively on Intel’s upcoming X58 chipset motherboards that support Nehalem processors on motherboards that have been SLI certified. The slides below tell the tale.
NVIDIA will have an SLI certification process for motherboards so it will be able to maintain a quality control standard. This means that the SBIOS on certified motherboards will have a key that allows NVIDIA SLI configurations to be supported properly by NVIDIA’s SLI drivers. NVIDIA SLI certification will be REQUIRED for SLI enablement.
UPDATE: I spoke a bit wrong above about x3 and x4 SLI, those modes will be done natively on the X58 as shown in the slides, but would have to divvy up the PCIe bandwidth of the single X58 chipset between cards. For the board to run in a true PCIe x16 SLI X 3 or SLI X 4 configuration, an additional NF 200 chipset would be needed per card. And if you are pushing that many pixels on a tremendously expensive setup like that, I would suggest a skinny PCIe bus would not behoove you as you would likely have a huge monitor to go with it (or would surely need to buy one). 
From NV on that:
[QUOTE]
BTW, you can run x3 and x4 without nForce 200. But the lane configs will be a x16 + 2 x8s or 4 x8s.
nForce 200 lets you do full bandwidth of 3 x16s or 4 x16s (with multiple nForce 200s).[/QUOTE]
More to come…