Asus P6T7 SuperComputer: good for QuadFire?

The P6T7 SuperComputer from Asus is an X58 motherboard, so that should mean only two PCIe 2.0 x16 slots (with full x16 lanes). But this board also adds two n200 chips to enable an additional two full PCIe 2.0 x16 lanes.

Technically, on paper, I see no reason why it wouldn't support QuadFire. But I know from experience that in actual practice, things can be different.

Anyone have any knowledge or experiences to share regarding this? I don't know if anyone would have (yet) built a system with QuadFire on this, given nVidia's dominance in the market until recently (and if they did, it was probably two 4870x2s). But for that very reason I imagine someone has done at least Tri-SLI on it, and could give a good review of at least that (did you get a stable system, does the n200 chip really work well paired with X58, questions questions).

It's been done and it works fine. But other 4 slot boards offer pretty much the same performance, no real hit when going down to 8x.

With last gen cards I imagine so....

But, and I guess I should have included this in the first post, what about if you are using 4 5870 GPUs? Sure only two running at x8 takes a small hit, 7% or so, but thats a 14% hit you take when you go to 4 GPUs each in an x8 lane (that..... probably isn't accurate, I'm just doubling it because I doubled the number of cards..... ya....).

Well, I happen to be talking with a friend right now that's running 4x5870's, and so far he's saying that it doesn't work at all on the eVGA Classified, but does on the P6T7, but he needs to run the bclk at 133 for it to be stable. New hardware, everything's immature...

P.S. obligatory you're insane for wanting to run 4 5870's

Edit- not only that but he says the scores are completely off too...not a combo that's really ready for prime time yet clearly

Gautam said:

Well, I happen to be talking with a friend right now that's running 4x5870's, and so far he's saying that it doesn't work at all on the eVGA Classified, but does on the P6T7, but he needs to run the bclk at 133 for it to be stable. New hardware, everything's immature...

P.S. obligatory you're insane for wanting to run 4 5870's

Edit- not only that but he says the scores are completely off too...not a combo that's really ready for prime time yet clearly

Click to expand...

I imagined that the drivers for QuadFire on the 5870s wouldn't be mature, heck the Asus board is the only one that supports enough PCIe 2.0 to not bandwidth bottleneck it at all. ATi see's that and says "how many people are actually going to drop $1500 for the GPU's and $400-$500 on the motherboard to be running this?

Ask your friend if TriFire works any better on the Classified or P6T7.

Edit: why am I insane? Sure the stock airflow will suck, but in a week or so waterblocks will be available, and Swiftech dropped the MCR420.....

He continued to have issues with 3. But I think newer drivers will bring better things.

Here's 4 5870's in CF on the P6T7 working well on a prerelease driver:

http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?t=235744

While I've never had anything but Asus boards(3 of them), I keep coming back when I'm looking at other because they always seem to do a good job of having very few issues with new hardware arrangements.

I'm just hoping that Asus comes out with a P6T6 with sata 3 and a B3 x58. I'll be all over that.