Friday, February 24th 2017
AMD's X370 Only Chipset to Support NVIDIA's SLI
Only AMD's top-of-the-line X370 chipset will support competing NVIDIA's SLI technology. AMD's next-in-line B350 eschews SLI support but retains CrossFire compatibility, while the low-end A320 chipset will offer no support for any such multi-GPU technologies. While this may seem a move by AMD to purposely gimp NVIDIA products on its platforms, it stands to reason that even enthusiasts tend to stay away from multi-GPU solutions and their associated problems. Besides, AMD will surely avoid any way of giving NVIDIA more funds than the company already has, by way of paying the "SLI Tax" on every chipset it ships. By limiting SLI support to its highest-end chipsets, AMD shaves some expenses from licensing efforts, whilst keeping SLI support to those that are, in truth, more likely to use them: power users, who will certainly spare no expense in springing to a X370-based platform.
As of now, some details remain unclear in the overall feature-set and compatibility differences between AMD's upcoming AM4 chipsets, but it would seem that only AMD's X370 chipset manages to leverage the full 20 PCIe lanes (18x if you run 2x SATA connections) delivered by AMD's Ryzen CPUs. This would look like a way for AMD to impose a "motherboard tax" on users, by limiting the number of PCIe lanes available on lower-end motherboards, and thus urging them to take the next step to their own X370. Apparently, PCIe lanes are not a differentiating factor between AMD chipsets (with X370, B350 and A320 all offering 4 native lanes), only their ability to access (or not) Ryzen's own 20.
Not much time until all of this is adequately cleared up, though.
Source:
Computerbase.de
As of now, some details remain unclear in the overall feature-set and compatibility differences between AMD's upcoming AM4 chipsets, but it would seem that only AMD's X370 chipset manages to leverage the full 20 PCIe lanes (18x if you run 2x SATA connections) delivered by AMD's Ryzen CPUs. This would look like a way for AMD to impose a "motherboard tax" on users, by limiting the number of PCIe lanes available on lower-end motherboards, and thus urging them to take the next step to their own X370. Apparently, PCIe lanes are not a differentiating factor between AMD chipsets (with X370, B350 and A320 all offering 4 native lanes), only their ability to access (or not) Ryzen's own 20.
Not much time until all of this is adequately cleared up, though.
69 Comments on AMD's X370 Only Chipset to Support NVIDIA's SLI
I generally don't buy top of line mobo for builds.
Games that run SLI destroys any single-gpu solution which is why after I go Ryzen I might pop in another 980 Ti :p
tl;dr - Sli support has grown massively,, almost all AAA games support it .. 980 Tis will certainly beat a 1080 Ti
The year is 2017 now, SLI are hugely scalable, no micro stutter whatsoever, it runs remarkably
Haha just saw your 60hz 'beast' monitor, Guess you don't play competitive FPS games :p
tl;dr - SLI is not Tri-SLI (3way) and SLI does in fact scale incredibly, do your research
Back on topic without randoms talking about other's experiences without trying it themselves, This is a good way for consumers to pinch a little more for their enthusiast needs.
www.techpowerup.com/reviews/NVIDIA/GeForce_GTX_1080_SLI/20.html
Also, 52% means you are only using 52% of the seconds cards power, 50% more is another way of saying 50% less processing power used from 100% of the cards ability.
But I still think more and more games are going to support SLI I wouldn't give up on it yet, especially to the other sites all these people trashing SLI, it has improved significantly over the years.
EDIT: totally didn't read the 1080 part, HAHA Yes,, But the 1080 Ti sure looks sweet :p
EDIT2: correct me if I am wrong but I am pretty sure two 980 Ti's would smoke one 1070, no?
but yea as was said SLi doesn't scale for shit right now. Unluckily this isn't 4 or 5 years ago when the opposite was true and crossfire was hit or miss. Welcome to 2017, the year of AMD.Nvidia doesn't gimp anything, they just stop adding additional updates for older cards... There has yet to be any proven loss going from one driver to the next on the nvidia side. You are starting to sound like you should lay off of the BS news sites a little bit.
but im hoping for a nice uplift when i upgrade cpu ,mobo,memory soon because this cpu is limited.
erm OT , seams fair enough to me , you want sli , pay Amd (hopefully) a bit more , i mean imagine that phonecall in amd land , so how much for us to licence sli nvidia, hmmn.
EDIT** Plus the price of reselling 980's are just going to go down from here, Nvidia will be forced to lower their prices in a few months which will hit older cards more.
Good for AMD for doing what will help them more for their name. I remember AMD going on about their 480's in xfire against i think the 1080. Get more driver support and it'll be golden.
Here is release date for the 980Ti vs the latest review w1z has available. Mind pointing out what resolution we lost performance in for nvidia?
here is a random intermediate driver and these are just random games that match between reviews. Not every game is tested every review.
Yes, X370 is the only chipset that allows for split lanes for 8/8 SLI/Crossfire, but the B350 supports a single x16 slot and 4 lanes for M.2. Crossfire on the B350 would be x16 3.0 + x4 2.0.
This is very clear looking at the specs from the board makers. Something was seriously lost in translation here.
Computerbase updated their story as there were mistakes in it.