NVIDIA's now well established SLI technology has, without a doubt, delivered exceptional levels of graphics performance, evident by the now CPU-bound nature of many games. However, there's always room for improvement, and we're starting to see newer implementations of SLI capable motherboards, like what we have today seen from ASUS.
The focus today is on the interconnect - PCI-Express. A standard PCIe graphics card uses a 16x PCIe link. However, in SLI mode you'll find that while both cards still have a 16x electrical connection, they only have 8 lanes of PCIe to play with, each. That's changing, however. ASUS has released two new motherboards, for AMD and Intel platforms, featuring dual 16x links in SLI mode, unlocking the full bandwidth theoretically available to the two graphics cards.
The two new boards from ASUS are the A8N32-SLI Deluxe and P5N32-SLI Deluxe, supporting Socket-939 and LGA775 CPUs respectively. Along with the dual 16x support, you get yourself six 3Gbps SATA ports, along with dual gigabit LAN, two Firewire ports and the regular nForce 4 perks.
The new boards don't just have new chipset and interconnect related features, however. ASUS have also come up with a new power delivery and board cooling system.
Both boards sport 8-phase power regulation. The reasons behind this, ASUS say, are to allow the power regulation to respond quicker, particularly when the CPU is put under load, and also to reduce voltage ripple. Furthermore the 8-phase solution is claimed to run some 15ºC cooler than more conventional solutions.
They've coupled their new power regulation circuitry with a fanless heatpipe chipset cooling design, which, hilariously, has optional fans, but with good reason. In some ways similar to what we've seen from ABIT's OTES, and of course similar to the cooling on the A8N SLI Premium, heat from the chipsets are conducted via heatpipes towards the I/O panel area of the motherboard where a heatsinks dissipate the heat. Ordinarily this is aided by air from the CPU fan. However ASUS has considered the watercoolers out there, and has optional fans which can be added when a fanless cooling solution is in place on the CPU. Hopefully the optional fans are silent, otherwise it would defeat the object of fanless/watercooling, wouldn't it?
We'll be seeing more dual 16x boards in due course and, no doubt at least a few will pass through the HEXUS labs, where we'll see if the extra bandwidth is of any use. In the meantime, check out ASUS' press release for more details on the board and its interesting new features.
