I know, my Blog has long gone to "rest", but this news made me post again, talk about being a Fanboy *yikes*. Anyway on with the news, if there's anything Intel has been missing on for quite some time in the Chipset-GPU support arena, it is the lack of native support of SLI on Intel-branded-chipset. Since the first release of PCIe way back the i915 series (Grantsdale), it has always been clamored and requested by Intel users: fanboys or normal users alike.
There has been earlier attempts on i915P thru some "rare" products such as the Albatron Mars PX915SLI, but for some weird reason, after some time, SLI support has gone "poof". Also for those hardcore Intel fanboys, they will recall that first ever SLI was indeed supported on Intel E7525 (Tumwater???) platform even before the word SLI became a household name among the techies. Later on, a few "hacked" drivers were released to support the later series of chipsets but soon, these hacked drivers became unpopular specially when "FM Approved" drivers became the norm, diminishing the results obtained from hacked drivers.
But alas, all is not lost, Skulltrail platform has been introduced. However, like the earlier SLI support, the D5400XS is based on a pricey server chipset with dual CPU slot and so adoption isn't as "common".
Hmm, I guess it's a bit of a mouthful introduction. Anyway, there are a few articles now floating on the web and I happen to grab this one from AMDTech (oops, Anandtech I mean):
Of course NVIDIA would wait until I physically left NVISION 08 to actually make an interesting announcement, but there’s no bitterness, I swear :)
The big, no, huge news from today? NVIDIA is enabling native support for 2 and 3-way SLI on Intel X58 based motherboards...without the use of any nForce 200 chips
Source:Anandtech
The folks at bit-tech had their paws and fangs wet with their first look with MSI's latest board MSI XPower X58. It looks cool, black and blue combo with heatpipe hogging the CPU VRMs. Forget about your "legacy" add-on card because this board won't take any old technology in its six 16x PCI-Express slots!!!!
