Those who have been wanting to use NVIDIA’s SLI technology have been forced to use motherboards based on NVIDIA’s own chipsets, even though there is no real technological reason for this. AMD/ATI and Intel chipsets have simply been locked out from running SLI. NVIDIA opened up the technology slightly with Intel’s Skulltrail platform where Intel got SLI support, but had to incorporate the external NF100 bridge chip to get it. When NVIDIA decided not to launch any chipsets for Intel’s new Bloomfield processor, but instead wait for the next generation of Nehalem-based processors, it was forced to make a move to keep its customers happy.
The initial move was to offer motherboard manufacturers the tuned NF200 chip for Intel X58-based motherboards and and in this way make it possible for Bloomfield users to run SLI. The problem was that NF200 was expensive, generated a lot of heat and was a real mess to implement. The result was that most motherboard manufacturers simply turned down the offer, ASUS being the exception, and NVIDIA then realized that this was not enough. It would exclude pretty much all of its users from upgrading to Intel’s latest platform. Big mistake.
It has now announced that the Intel X58 chipset supports SLI natively. Even without any kind of external PCI Express bridge chips or such. This means that it will become a lot cheaper for motherboard manufacturers to implement SLI with the Bloomfield platform. It should also result in a greater variety.
Every motherboard has to be sent to NVIDIA and verified though, which means that SLI-enabled X58 motherboards, even without the NF200 chip, will be more expensive than “normal” X58 motherboards, which only supports CrossFireX. Expect to pay up to $20 more for the SLI enablement, and even more for motherboards that have the high-end option of the integrated NF200 chip. Although NVIDIA openly admitted that few tasks actually need the additional bandwidth.
