Sandy Bridge and SLI?

[Zarathustra[H]]

Hey all,

I heard a rumor that I am trying to substantiate without any real success.

The rumor is that there is no agreement between Intel and Nvidia for SLI with the new chipsets for Sandy Bridge like there was for the X58 Express chipsets, and as such we will not see SLI enabled motherboards for Sandy Bridge (at least at launch).

I have however tried to find a source for this information without any success.

Does anyone know if this is accurate and ahve a source with which to back it up?

 

[King of Heroes]

Considering what a massive thorn Intel has been to Nvidia (blew away chipset business, killing Ion 2 with Atom SoC), I wouldn't be terribly surprised by this. Then again, SLI licensing is still a cash flow, so it'd be kind of silly not to extend support.

 

[TheGuyOnTheCouch]

That's incorrect.

I have a board here running SLI on Sandy Bridge from Gigabyte.

 

[TheGuyOnTheCouch]

Considering what a massive thorn Intel has been to Nvidia (blew away chipset support, killing Ion 2 with Atom SoC), I wouldn't be terribly surprised by this. Then again, SLI licensing is still a cash flow, so it'd be kind of silly not to extend support.

Do you think NVidia would be stupid enough to not allow SLI on Intel's upcoming CPU family? They're done with chipsets, so they have to play nice with Intel.

 

[Furystrike]

I'm fairly certain that one of the gigabyte boards previewed has support for 2x16 or 4x8 SLI via the nForce200 chipset. From what I understand, intel/nvidia dont need to agree on anything, the motherboard manufacturer only needs to slap the NF chip on the board

 

[Zarathustra[H]]

That's incorrect.

I have a board here running SLI on Sandy Bridge from Gigabyte.

Excellent. This is welcome news.

How - exactly - does one come accross unreleased hardware so early?

 

[ilkhan]

Just like s1156, s1155 will support 2x8 SLI/XFire just fine.

 

[TheGuyOnTheCouch]

Just like s1156, s1155 will support 2x8 SLI/XFire just fine.

This.

 

[stockwiz]

with the nforce 200 chip, 3 way SLI can be supported, with one card running at full x16 and the other two cards sharing an x16 lane. No agreements needed. These are your top priced motherboards though.. I'll have to wait and see how much they cost before buying. Hopefully there's more then just gigabyte.. would love to get an EVGA board with that chip in.

alternately you can go SLI at full x16 which is mostly what I want, since x8 will start to become a bottleneck with the next generation of cards that comes out next year. x16 should be good for a few years.

 

[DarkStryke]

I'm fairly certain that one of the gigabyte boards previewed has support for 2x16 or 4x8 SLI via the nForce200 chipset. From what I understand, intel/nvidia dont need to agree on anything, the motherboard manufacturer only needs to slap the NF chip on the board

There is no nForce chip required for SLI, it's simply a bios modification that costs licensing fees. All the NF200 does is basically traffic manage the PCI-E lanes between the cards and the chipset / CPU, which really does nothing except add heat and cost for gaming.