Thursday, August 28th 2008
Best News of the Day, NVIDIA Allows Native SLI Support for Intel X58
Apparently NVIDIA has decided to give all Intel owners a big present by introducing the native support of its SLI technology for Intel Nehalem. This information was published first at The Tech Report by Scott Wasson, and comes directly from the final editors meeting of NVISION. According to Tom Peterson, director of Technical Marketing for MCP products at NVIDIA, the company will authorize native SLI support on Intel X58 motherboards without the need of its nForce 200 chip - under certain circumstances. Those circumstances actually include a certification process of every Intel X58 motherboard at NVIDIA's Santa Clara certification lab. Once in the lab, the boards must pass basic testing for functionality, slot placement, and other criterions. After that the makers of these boards must select from a menu of licensing options available to them. Afterward to be certified boards will also be required to display an "SLI Certified" logo on their boxes and other marketing materials. Once the above steps are completed without a problem, NVIDIA will provide the board maker with an approval "cookie" key that it must embed in the system BIOS. The combination of this approval key and an Intel X58 chipset will then unlock SLI support in NVIDIA's ForceWare driver software. The whole process of certification is reported to be cheaper than the cost of the nForce 200 chip alone, which is around US $30. That's the interesting part you need to know, now we wait. The full story is posted here.
Source:
The Tech Report
39 Comments on Best News of the Day, NVIDIA Allows Native SLI Support for Intel X58
:confused:
Though, hopefully, this means that the early x58 boards that are released without SLI certification will eventually be able to use SLI via a simple BIOS flash once certification is complete.
I'm sure all of this is a result of most of the motherboard manufacturers telling nVidia to go pound sand when nVidia required the nForced 200 chip on the board to do SLI. And for that I must pat the motherboard manufacturers on the back.
I'll probably wait 'til second-gen chipsets anyways though, because I won't be upgrading my board and processor for at least another year.
AMD won’t be able to participate in this SLI software licensing program, simply as Nvidia chipset boys see AMD's chipset division as competition. Nvidia also told many journalists that it still hasn't changed its mind about making a Bloomfield / Core i7 chipset and therefore it wants to give SLI to early Nehalem adopters.
AMD is considered a competitor in the chipset business and Nvidia still wants to keep SLI for itself as it sees this as a good selling point for its own chipsets.
You can decide on your own if this is a fair move or not but this is the reality. Nvidia is still very dedicated to making an SLI chipset for AMD processors and if it solves things to its advantage it will even make QPI chipsets, but this is something no one knows as this is mainly up to Intel. :nutkick:
So, don't expect to see SLI on AMD 790/770 series chipsets, or any other AMD chipsets for that matter.
This is great news... cause we can just bios mod this cookie into other boards :D
I beleive the problem with that approach on multiple cards would be that without direct driver access, the cards couldnt work as a regular card outside of crossfire (a jumper on the card might be a good idea, swap between master and slave mode)
Why do I need a crossfire or sli chipset... It's BS, you didn't need that with the all original SLI, so I'm thinking its a money thing, they are lazy and want you to buy the "special" board.
#1 its more money
#2 it ensures compatibility.
its like ram, you need a heap of tweaking options to get every stick of DDR2 to work in a DDR2 board - and it gets more complex with dual channel for example, whereas crossfire or SLI they're trying to make it plug and play.
Wonder how much that will hurt Nvidia chipsets for the Nehalem market. Good news for the consumer though : )