14 DAY TRIAL // At the beginning of this month, AMD has released the 900-series chipsets for the AM3/AM3+ processors and one of the most important features brought by this new design was support for Nvidia's SLI technology.
Now, more than a week after the release of these chipsets, SLI still isn't enabled as Nvidia has yet to release a driver that supports dual-GPU setups.
This information was uncovered by the Expreview publication that tried to review an Nvidia SLI setup on a motherboard powered by AMD's latest chipset, the 990FX.
Using the latest beta driver that is available on Nvidia's website, the 275.33, the two GeForce GTX 570 cards were recognized by the system, but SLI couldn't be activated as the driver didn't support it.
The latest stable driver also doesn't support this functionality, so users who hoped they would be able to build an SLI setup using an AMD system have to wait until a new driver is released.
When the 900-series chipsets were introduced, a series of websites have published reviews of various 990FX motherboards running SLI setups, but these used a custom driver (270.77) that was supplied by Nvidia only for testing purposes.
Another option for running SLI on the 990FX at this time is to hack the 275.36 Quadro drivers by following the instructions posted by a user on the Overclock.net forums.
Nvidia announced at the end of April that select AMD 900-series chipsets will come with support for SLI setups as long as the companies building these solutions owned an SLI license.
Motherboards built using the 990FX chipset should be able to support 3-way SLI setups, while 990X owners could enable 2-way SLI.
The 900-series north bridge chipsets can be paired together with the AMD SB950 south bridge controller to add support for six SATA 6Gbps ports.