XLi?
Last week at NVIDIAs editors’ day I spent some time talking to 2nd Tier Taiwanese mainboard vendor, who have recently been working hard to break into the enthusiast market, something which we have seen strong support for.We have learnt that NVIDIA needed to pick key partners in order to develop SLI. They decided to worked with the 'big 3' - in the form of MSI, ASUS, and Gigabyte. These three worked with NVIDIA in order to build the reference solution and following that to iron out the original bugs, both silicon and electrical. As a result you will probably see a lot of similarity in these manufacturers' boards over the coming months.
NVIDIA also released SLI chipsets to the other mainboard vendors but did not provide the same level of direction and support, which should hopefully lead to some more varied products.
In our extensive SLi coverage we showed the bridge ‘PCB’ connector and the physical 'SODIMM' selection PCB. This allows the user to select single or dual graphics cards. Over the past few years we have seen more and more migration from hardware based tweaks to BIOS integration so this sudden reversal was a surprise to us.
However, from our conversations with several tier 2 vendors we have learnt that there other board vendors have decided to take a different approach and are attempting to allow the selection to be performed in the BIOS.
We have also had it reported to us that you do not need the additional PCB bridge, which NVIDIA claims to pump 1GB/s throughput, apparently this can be run via the board. We are dubious about this, but we are interested in seeing the performance hit on this change. We know that the PCI-E bus is capable of running high bandwidth graphics (Alienwares original ALX video array technology).
Since the official launch of SLi it has become apparent that NVIDIA have launched an initiative to help 'control' and provide support to SLI. This is in the form of a validation suite, people can submit boards, chipsets and other parts to their SLi program to check to see if it conforms.
This solution from this board vendor does not appear to be within the SLI guidelines which are outlined by NVIDIA and the top 3 motherboard vendors. But will we see NVIDIA validate it? Only time will tell. All we know for sure is that different vendors will be launching their technology under their own brand.
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Update: From several conversations which we have had today some board vendors do not believe that the performance of this implementation will be to the same level as other SLi products. Our advice? Wait and see - you will see it here first.
