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More on X58 SLI support
Author: Tim SmalleyPublished: 28th August 2008
We've got some more information on Nvidia's X58 SLI announcement following discussions with the company's chipset team.
The first thing to note is that Nvidia expects the certification process to be complete on at least a few boards by the time X58 launches. The company’s representatives said the driver work is already done, it’s just a matter of running submitted boards through the certification process at Nvidia’s Santa Clara Certification Lab.
There will be one ‘cookie’ given to each vendor and there will be certain limitations placed on its use – Nvidia wouldn’t answer questions about vendors adding the cookie onto boards that haven’t been through the certification process, but it said logos and branding are a couple of the conditions of use.
So what about if a budding enthusiast manages to extract the key from one or more boards? Nvidia said it wouldn’t do anything to stop enthusiasts enabling SLI support on non-certified motherboards themselves. Tom Petersen, Technical Marketing Director in Nvidia’s chipset business unit, said that he’d be quite happy if enthusiasts did that because it’d mean they’d be using two (or more) Nvidia graphics cards in their system.
Click to enlarge
He added that the certification process is in place to ensure a great out-of-the-box experience – boards that aren’t certified by Nvidia may encounter problems and it’ll require some BIOS modification on the user’s part. I’m not quite sure how Nvidia will react to custom BIOS files enabling SLI support on non-certified boards being hosted on the ‘net, as the company’s legal team has had a fairly rocky relationship with modified driver developers in the past – things could play out either way here.
I then asked whether Nvidia was planning to support other multi-GPU enabled chipsets from AMD and Intel – sadly, that’s not going to happen any time soon but based on what we’ve been told and that’s a bit of a shame. We’re going one step at a time here though.
One reason cited by Petersen was that X58 supports peer-to-peer writing which, he says, is almost exactly the same as the PW Short technology it introduced with the NF200 SLI switch chip. As a result, Nvidia is taking advantage of this technology to provide optimal SLI performance on Intel’s next-generation chipset.
Click to enlarge
PW Short hasn’t been in every Nvidia chipset though, and SLI still works on chipsets that don’t support the technology – this makes me question what’s actually happening here. On the face of it, what Nvidia is doing is a good thing and I applaud the step forward it is taking here – but why is it stopping at just X58? It’s undoubtedly down to a combination of chipset sales in other market segments, driver development and the burden of certifying many different platforms – it’s not just down to the lack of peer-to-peer writes, that’s for sure.
We’ve asked Intel for a comment on Nvidia’s announcement, but we’ve not received anything official at the time of publication. What do you think about Nvidia’s move? Join the continuing discussion in the forums.
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Comments (22)
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not so good for us who are still 50:50 on whether to go SLi/Crossfire or not. extra spending on something might not use at all.
if its a case of offering intel chipset quad overclocking with full on nvidia sli then i would be making the move on that decision alone
However SLI or crossfire is handy if you have bought one card and a year later buy the same card for dump price. there is one problem, and that is that the card is not made anymore or nobody has them anymore in the stores. "no sir we only got the new generation or a remake of the old type you have buld on 55nm instead of 80nm. And they are not compatible with your old card."
Another fact is that if you buy two brand new cards for sli/crossfire. It takes a year before you see benefit of the increased speed needed for the 'then' new games coming out. But guess what, by then you can also buy the new and improved video card with hexwaxed multi polymoly 3D and DX11 options and takes half the power and less heat your sli setup does.
peace
fatman
It needs to be transparent to the software, or it needs to learn how to split jobs before software is optimised thusly... otherwise its like buying a quad core for notepad!
Now we can start pirating SLI compatibilty for our motherboard by adding some bits into the BIOS
I like some of the features of gaming mobo's but sometimes I feel like they thrown on these extremely fancy features that a really small % of the use base would actually ever use
I think they must do like gigabyte > DS3Sli for those who need SLI and DS3CFX for those who need CF and DS4 Have both but no SAS or turbo thing. and DQ6 HAVE every thing :D
my point that they must make levels and different models of motherboards not stick with one!
as i do not like SLI seem to have more problems with it allways used single powerfull cards (GTX 280 is next on my list to replace the 9800GX2 (2 weeks old i had to turn SLI off) that replaced my 8800GTX that i had no problems with)
I can see the business train of thought is directly responsible for this, but still pretty cool.
Opens us up for both paths without farting around with new motherboards all the damn time!
Yep, something like the Skulltrail Southbridge cooler. Or worse....
Watch out Credit Cards, here i come!