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
I got a 610i w/integrated 7050 gpu for my gf's pc and it's been mostly stable so far. The only problem I'm having is getting it to recognize the raid array from my 680i while I RMA my board. Well, the board recognizes it in BIOS anyways, just when windows boots off my other drive that's not in RAID but with RAID enabled, it crashes. I think it's more a driver issue though, since I just migrated my drive with windows already installed to the board and installed the drivers, but I didn't do any sort of "cleanup" first.
Suprised I figured Nvidia would jump on the new market. Is AMD/ATI making x58 chipsets?
crosfire is software based i think