[Super Nade]

Anandtech say the new NVIDA NForce 4 SLI chipset can support 2 video cards!
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets...spx?i=2248&p=3

Wow! That is crazy. Imagine playing Doom 3 with two 6800 Ultras!

The hype aside, is this going to impact gaming in the immediate future? I suppose a single video card can handle any available game currently in the market. The monitor people and the game writers are already playing catch-up so I see no impact in the near future. An interesting question would be how this would match up to the really high end graphics cards like the quadro? PPl working with graphics intensive apps could get better bang for their buck.

Finally,

Anybody who's gonna grab one say aey!

[Ad Rock]

It looks promising man, I am personally holding off on going 64-bit until I can get a Nforce4 board with SLI and Native SATA support .

You saw the thread with the results that was linked on this page right?

SLI

Looks like its going to be pretty sweet if you combine two 6600gt's.

[El-Scotto]

noob question, is this only compatible with with geforce cards?

[iNterBeiNg]

Originally Posted by El-Scotto

noob question, is this only compatible with with geforce cards?

yep

[El-Scotto]

darn and i was going to get ready to buy an x800 this gonna make me have to think about it more

[Super Nade]

Originally Posted by El-Scotto

noob question, is this only compatible with with geforce cards?

Thats a very good Q! Its an NVidia chipset so that x's out the goodies for Ati I wonder if VIA would bounce ahead with an "any PCI-e" dual solution. Thanks Ad rock... very informative link. Lets see what pops up in a few months.

[Sentential]

Originally Posted by Super Nade

Thats a very good Q! Its an NVidia chipset so that x's out the goodies for Ati I wonder if VIA would bounce ahead with an "any PCI-e" dual solution. Thanks Ad rock... very informative link. Lets see what pops up in a few months.

Since this is reletivly old news, ill explain.

SLI is old 3dfx technology, which was later bough by nV. SLI functions by using a bridge interface to 2 6X series graphics cards. When bridged each card renders only half of the visible screen, thus effectively doubling performance.

ATi cannot and will not support SLI for 3 reasons:
#1 Its copyrighted by 3DFX and nVidia
#2 It requires a bridgechip built ONTO the VPU die.
#3 It took nV's driver team almost 2.5 years to complete SLI WHQL drivers.

The reason why the NV40 die is so large is because almost the entire left edge is the SLI bridge chip. The AGP versions also have this bridge chip, and it shows the ability of SLI as "active" on nVidia's driver tab. However since the physical interface is not present on the AGP version, it cannot do SLI.

[Super Nade]

Thanks Sentinel.
What is the deal with vendors contemplating 2 PCI-e slots? Is it the same thing i.e NV specific you described above? I thought the MoBo makers could do a dual Vid card thing like the Dual processor support. How is this different? If you can run a cluster why can't you run dual vid cards? Cant you write special load sharing drivers for this?

[deathBOB]

http://www.tomshardware.com/motherbo...force4-09.html

Asus
Availability of nForce4 Ultra motherboards A8N-E (Premium/SLI):

second week of November
Asus is considering bundling two GeForce 6600GT graphics cards with the A8N-E SLI.

hmmm... cool deal...

[David]

I think SLI on the voodoo cards works differently than SLI on the newer nvidia cards. On the Vodoos it was Scan Line Interleave - I beleive the newer Nvidia SLI means Scalable Link Interface - and works slightly different but to the same end.