Wednesday, September 19th 2007
Intel X38 Supports SLI ?
During his keynote today at IDF, Intel's Pat Gelsinger showed off a machine based on the company's Skulltrail enthusiast gaming platform. Skulltrail is a dual-socket platform based on the X38 chipset that supports Intel's upcoming 45nm Quad-Core processors, FB-DIMM memory and offers PCI Express 2.0 support and true dual-x16 PEG slots (or four x8 PCI Express x16 slots). What was interesting about the machine on display was that it used a pair of GeForce graphics cards running in SLI mode, but on an Intel chipset. According to Intel, this is a special version of Intel X38 paired with NVIDIA's nForce MCP to enable SLI support. There's no word on official SLI support with future Intel chipsets, though.
Ed. by W1zzard: You can't pair X38 with any NVIDIA MCP because both are the same: a Northbridge with memory controller. It would be possible to put an NVIDIA southbridge on the board but this wouldn't enable SLI because that many PCI-E lanes are not routed through the SB. Since technically SLI works on ANY chipset, NVIDIA could enable SLI on X38 only if an NVIDIA SB is present.
Source:
HotHardware
43 Comments on Intel X38 Supports SLI ?
And if they buy that, they will HAVE to buy Crossfire.
So, in a way, if they give Intel their 680i SouthBridge, they won't make money off of the motherboards, but at least they will still make money on GPUs, which is how they make most of their revenue anyway.
I talked to a guy at EVGA yesterday that mentioned the 790i will be out in a month or so.
X38 or 790i Hmmmm.
790i! only a month!? I thought it was the start of nexted year, just before peryn.
this will definitely be an interesting war with both being SLI compatible, but only Intel being Crossfire compatible... hmm. X38 looks pretty insane tho.
Have there been any official releases or press updates on the 790i? Or only word of mouth? I found googling 2 other forums that had info on it, but it was scanty as best.