Is it just me

franco_22 · 16 Aug 2010 at 01:26

or most motherboards now a days only support Crossfire?

Maybe I'm not looking very deep but seems like most motherboards, except the really expensive ones only support Crossfire and not SLI?

Would love to see a good AM3 or 1156 board that supports SLI and doesn't cost an arm and a leg.

MeatLoaf · 17 Aug 2010 at 13:12

Most AM2/3 boards only support crossfire but theres are a few that support SLI, there just very few and far between.

With intel boards you really need a decent 775 or 1366 board. Some 1156 boards support it but i think they only work at 8x/8x

R.C.Anderson · 17 Aug 2010 at 13:38

Crossfire is for ATI cards, which are made by AMD, so they want to promote their gfx cards rather than NVidia's with their own CPUs

Hagar · 17 Aug 2010 at 14:08

R.C.Anderson said:
Crossfire is for ATI cards, which are made by AMD, so they want to promote their gfx cards rather than NVidia's with their own CPUs

Nvidia charge for licensing SLI, AMD do not for crossfire.

andy

mrtckane · 17 Aug 2010 at 14:36

x58 boards do both.

R.C.Anderson · 17 Aug 2010 at 19:52

nkata said:
Nvidia charge for licensing SLI, AMD do not for crossfire.

andy

^^ and that... Which is probably why AMD don't want to spend any extra money promoting their competitors I would guess.

franco_22 · 17 Aug 2010 at 20:21

nkata said:
Nvidia charge for licensing SLI, AMD do not for crossfire.

andy

Mhm I wonder why they do that. Surely they would sell more cards if they let manufacterers create more SLI motherboards?

cmndr_andi · 17 Aug 2010 at 20:33

Yea, but the SLI license is one of the few motherboard revenue streams they have left after being squeezed out of the motherboard chipset market.

As for only high-end boards having SLI - well yes, that makes sense. If you want SLI to be useful then you realistically want at least x8x8 PCIe on the board for a start (AFAIK all of which cost £90+). If SLI was offered on boards with less than this it would be a bit of a waste.

Furthermore, SLI is most definitely an enthusiast feature (people planning to spend £200+ on graphics cards), so offering it on higher-end board does make a bit of sense to me.

reflux · 17 Aug 2010 at 20:35

IIRC Intel socket 1156 and 1366 mobos that can run SLi do so merely by providing a second PCI-E slot. There's no need for any specialized hardware - Nvidia tried to convince mobo manufacturers that they needed a special chip to make it work, but the manufacturers realised it wasn't necessary.