LinkBoost Technology

NVIDIA's flagship nForce 590 SLI MCP's include NVIDIA LinkBoost technology which automatically increases bandwidth by up to 25% when select NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards are detected. This feature currently only works with the 7900GTX and is activated automatically as soon as a supported video card is detected. This means the normal 100 MHz speed of the two PCIe links is increased to 125 MHz and the normal 200 MHz HT link is increased to 250 MHz. When LinkBoost is detected, it is automatically activated without user intervention and displayed clearly in the system POST screen.

The user can choose to overclock even further by increasing the PCI Express and HyperTransport interconnect bandwidth. It remains to be seen how much the LinkBoost Technology will help performance considering that the CPU has become the limiting factor with high end DualSLI or QuadSLI configurations. Performance gains through the raised PCI Express and HyperTransport speeds may still be bottlenecked by what the CPU can deliver or the GPU can render.