Thursday, August 6th 2009
SLI Hacked on Older Intel Chipsets
NVIDIA's SLI multi-GPU technology served as the biggest selling point of nForce series chipsets, as it was exclusive to it. With the advent of LGA-1366 processors and the Intel X58 chipset, NVIDIA allowed the Intel chipset to support the technology, as it soon became clear that it isn't going to be easy for NVIDIA to come up with an LGA-1366 chipset. Users of the older LGA-775 however still have the option of buying nForce 700 series based motherboards to use SLI, and hence no real attempt was made to ensure the technology is available to Intel chipsets. Until now.
A member of Expreview's Chinese enthusiast community has successfully enabled SLI on an Intel chipset based LGA-775 motherboard, the first feat of its kind since much older attempts on i975 platforms using much older GeForce hardware. Firewings_[CCG] successfully ran SLI of GeForce 8600 GT and GeForce GTX 260 cards on his Intel X38+ICH9R chipset based ASUS Maximus Formula motherboard. The feat is headed by software he modified, details of which will surface soon. The mod was validated by Expreview staff, who used the software to run GeForce GTX 260 SLI on a more recent P45+ICH10R based Maximus II Formula motherboard. "By installing the software that Firewings [CCG] provides us, we managed to enable SLI configuration in Directory Services Restore Mode. Due to some 'small problems' according to Firewings [CCG], the SLI configuration can't be realized in normal mode for now, but he says this will be fixed soon," commented Expreview. With SLI enabled, the multi-GPU setup was able offer performance scaling that proves the mod works.
Source:
Expreview
A member of Expreview's Chinese enthusiast community has successfully enabled SLI on an Intel chipset based LGA-775 motherboard, the first feat of its kind since much older attempts on i975 platforms using much older GeForce hardware. Firewings_[CCG] successfully ran SLI of GeForce 8600 GT and GeForce GTX 260 cards on his Intel X38+ICH9R chipset based ASUS Maximus Formula motherboard. The feat is headed by software he modified, details of which will surface soon. The mod was validated by Expreview staff, who used the software to run GeForce GTX 260 SLI on a more recent P45+ICH10R based Maximus II Formula motherboard. "By installing the software that Firewings [CCG] provides us, we managed to enable SLI configuration in Directory Services Restore Mode. Due to some 'small problems' according to Firewings [CCG], the SLI configuration can't be realized in normal mode for now, but he says this will be fixed soon," commented Expreview. With SLI enabled, the multi-GPU setup was able offer performance scaling that proves the mod works.
69 Comments on SLI Hacked on Older Intel Chipsets
Just wondering why those cards aren't recognized by GPU-Z tho...
One oddity: x48 and x48 are supposed to have two full 16x slots - so why are they reading as 8x slots?
"Firewings_[CCG] successfully ran SLI of GeForce 8600 GT and GeForce GTX 260 cards on his Intel X38+ICH9R chipset based ASUS Maximus Formula motherboard. The feat is headed by software he modified, details of which will surface soon. The mod was validated by Expreview staff, who used the software to run GeForce GTX 260 SLI on a more recent P45+ICH10R based Maximus II Formula motherboard"
They also mention "Directory Services Restore Mode" whatever that is.
But even then, surely nothing else capable of running a 3D app is active.
Seems highly suspicious to me. :wtf:
Anyway - lets try and keep this on topic, and wait for news/leaks of this 'driver'.
P45 and SLI, *drool*
So better leak it soon, so that it's all over the interwebs and here to stay. They can probably block it in future drivers, but in the meantime people can have some fun :)
and they're gonna smack em right into jail