Does Motherboard work with SLI?

i have a ASUS P5K Premium Black Pearl Edition mobo and it mentions working with crossfire but nothing about SLI, does it not work with SLI and if not what mobo's do?

Well, without "modified" drives, no, you won't be able to run SLi.

to the forums!!

Officially you can't run sli. But there are modified drivers that would enable it. But most of them are pretty old and they sometimes suffer heavily from bugs. (on a side note they aren't exactly legal, so you can't get any support either)

argh... guess i'll have to get a different one.... what would you recomend, i'm running a qx6700 with 4g ram(going to be 8) with one 8800GTX OC2 (going to be 2) I'm looking for something top-of-the-line

PyROphantasie said:

argh... guess i'll have to get a different one.... what would you recomend, i'm running a qx6700 with 4g ram(going to be 8) with one 8800GTX OC2 (going to be 2) I'm looking for something top-of-the-line

Click to expand...

You need to be looking at a nVidia chipset then such as the 680i.

it's not long until the next gen nv chipset is released

the only chipset coming out soon from NV is the 7xxx chipset, its already out for AMD cpus. there hasnt been any word of a new NV chipset just yet.

What do you need all that horsepower for?

8GB RAM over 4GB isn't going to do anything, and you're going to need two high-res monitors to see a difference w/ an extra 8800GTX...and I'm not even sure you can run 2 monitors while in SLI. Somebody chime in if they know differently.

I don't mean to come off harsh, but I'd hate to see anyone spend that much $, and not even be able to even notice a difference. It might bench better, but going from 100fps to 130fps isn't going to be noticeable.

I'd look to a quad, or a matrix RAID setup if you have $ to burn, and want a noticeable improvement in performance.

You can use two monitors in SLI mode, ONLY if you use an additional PCI VGA card.

Other wise you are stock with one monitor.

well i'm going to be displaying on a 36in HD LCD TV and i'm an animation and visual effects major so i'm going to be running a lot of photoshop, aftereffects, Maya, 3Dsmax, that sort of stuff, and of course i play a lot of video games and i want to make this comp as future proof as possible, i dont plan on upgrading to all this stuff immediatly, i just bought all my hardware (the water cooling stuff hasnt even arrived yet) and i'm a little short on money, so in maybe a year or less i plan on doin the SLI, an the 8g of ram so i'm just look'n for a good motherboard that can do all that stuff and have good overclocking abilities, doesnt even have to be out yet, just comming out within a year

btw, what do you mean quad and matrix raid setup? I've heard of raid 0/1, i'm already doing that to 2 320g hdd's

Quad as in the CPU.

Matrix RAID is something available on Intels ICH9R (and some previous versions). It allows you to run a RAID 0 array, and a RAID 1 or RAID 5 array on the same group of HDDs. Plus the "slice" you cut out for your RAID 0 array can be comprised of the fastest part of the HDDs to give you even faster load times/speeds for your OS, games, and programs. Very cool stuff...check out the Matrix RAID sticky in the storage forum.

If you're planning on doing SLI in a year I highly recommend you just sell your current GPU at that time, and buy a newer one. Whatever is out by then will probably tromp 2 GTX's in SLI anyway. You have a 36" LCD HDTV...must be 720p or 768p, right? I don't know if 1080p's come that small. At those resolutions you are already overkill w/ your GTX. I've got a 720p projector (95" on the screen), and my 320MB 8800GTS has no problems w/ all the current games on high settings.

As far as 8GB RAM...have you checked to see if those programs are using more than your current 4GB? (check task manager...bottom right corner...if left number is more than 4048M when you're program(s) are running then you may need more RAM) If they are then by all means go for 8GB, but I haven't heard of any case so far where anything more than 4GB was actually being used at a given time. With those programs you're running, though, you may be a candidate.

I'd look to X38 or X48 if you're going to be waiting. It supports PCI-e 2.0, so if you do get a new GPU in a year it might actually be able to take advantage of the extra bandwidth. I'm not sure if SLI will be officially supported on the X38/48, but you can be sure some hacked drivers will be out there for it. X38 should be out by next month...X48 shouldn't be too far behind. nVidia may release a new MoBo chipset in the coming month(s) as well, but I haven't heard anything concrete yet. Lots of choices coming! If you're going to wait anyway, see what's out at the end of the year, and wait to buy it right after the new year. If you don't want to wait too long wait till the end of the month and get an X38 when they first come out. If you can't wait at all get a P35...or 680i if you must have SLI.