Am3+ sli?

[w0ng3r]

With Bulldozer scheduled for release within the next 3-4 months or so, i wonder if we might witness the miracle birth of a new SLI capable AMD motherboard? god knows the 980a is old.

Anyone got any insight?

 

[djshortsleeve]

With Bulldozer scheduled for release within the next 3-4 months or so, i wonder if we might witness the miracle birth of a new SLI capable AMD motherboard? god knows the 980a is old.

Anyone got any insight?

whats wrong with crossfire?

 

[dawp]

whats wrong with crossfire?

nothing but maybe he has a couple of nvidia already and just wants to keep them. not everyone can afford to replace everything at once.

 

[nenforcer]

Highly unlikely. I think nVidia has abandoned any and all intention of increasing the cpu sales of their one and only competitor in the GPU space.

I don't think they even pushed the 980A at all. It was nearly identical to the 780A besides adding AM3/DDR3 support to clear out existing inventory. Only 3 980A boards were ever produced, AFAIK. 2 by ASUS and the one by MSI.

With ION pretty much fazed out your best bet for an nVidia chipset is the Tegra 2 in a smartphone.

 

[w0ng3r]

I currently have a 480, I plan to get a 590 later on, but from what I've read, it seems I can get sli working on a cf board (hopefully that remains true when bulldozer is released)

thanks for the input though

 

[beakynb]

Unbeliveably, having used Anandtech for ages for reviews and great information, this is my first post!

Anyway, what brought me to here was I'm looking for a replacement motherboard that supports SLI but I wanted something that was more up to date than the 980a, especially considering the nvidia chipsets are no more.

Like many others, I have 2 x nvidia GPU's so don't fancy forking out to replace them if I move to an AMD chipset. Now I know there's a hack for this but I'm not convinced it always works.

My thought is, if nvidia have stopped designing and producing chipsets, what's the future for their SLI? From what I can see, so far, all that's stops SLI working on non-nvidia chipsets is nvidia's GPU driver, which looks for specific hardware in the HAL to force us to use a nvidia chipset.

So, surely if nvidia want SLI to continue, as I'm sure they do, they must at some point some remove this dependancy from their GPU driver.

nvidia SLI is dead otherwise.

Does anyone have a view on this or any insight into whether nvidia plan to remove this dependancy from their driver?

Thanks,

 

[nenforcer]

I think when AMD releases Bulldozer and the 9XX series chipsets you might start to see something from nVidia.

This entirely depends on the sales of Bulldozer, however, since by volume AMD is no where near Intel chipsets.

As it stands today, if you want Tri-SLI or any SLI period on AMD, you can still buy a 980A board and install a 6-core AMD Phenom ][.

Until you can't install the latest / fastest chip from AMD on an nVidia chipset motherboard this limitation isn't going away.

I would think, depending on the performance of Bulldozer, you might seem something this fall. However, if Bulldozer is not competitive with Core i7 much less Sandy Bridge, I doubt you will see any change from nVidia.

 

[Elixer]

The *only* reason you can't do SLI on AMD boards is because nvidia's drivers lock you out. (DRM).

I see no sign at all that nvidia will change this idiotic move by them.

 

[Bigun08]

I was shown this interesting link the other day by a forum user who claims it worked on his ASUS Crosshair IV Formula to run SLi.. I was really thinking about it to get an update from My MSI NF980-g65 board.. But with out hard numbers I really don't see a need ATM.. I was just interested in SATA 6gb and USB 3.0.. but I waiting for that same guy to show me his numbers with two 570s on that board and see how much more he gets than I do currently
http://xdevs.com/e107_plugins/content/content.php?content.30

 

[w0ng3r]

I was shown this interesting link the other day by a forum user who claims it worked on his ASUS Crosshair IV Formula to run SLi.. I was really thinking about it to get an update from My MSI NF980-g65 board.. But with out hard numbers I really don't see a need ATM.. I was just interested in SATA 6gb and USB 3.0.. but I waiting for that same guy to show me his numbers with two 570s on that board and see how much more he gets than I do currently
http://xdevs.com/e107_plugins/content/content.php?content.30

6gbps and a good RAID controller is going to be a definite must, with everyone waiting on the vertex 3 (and other SF2k SSD's), I'm sooooooo excited, impatient and nervous