Motherboards

Two Graphics Cards Are Good, Three Are Even Better

Nvidia's nForce 680, 780, 790 chipsets to support three-way SLI

By Alexandru Pancescu, Hardware Editor

28th of September 2007, 10:22 GMT

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When the graphics processing units and mainboard chipsets manufacturing company Nvidia introduced the SLI technology it opened in fact the way for a number of additional versions and modifications of that multi graphics cards setup. After the classic two cards setup came the quad configuration that supported up to four identical graphics cards and even if that concept did not work very well for any number of reasons, Nvidia seems determined to prove that a three-way SLI solution is a good idea.

As using the SLI technology is closely linked to the support provided by the mainboard's chipset, in order to provide the possibility to use two or more graphics cards, Nvidia also must enable that support on its chipsets and according to the news site nordichardware, the next generation of mainboard chipsets from the green company are said to deliver that support.

The possibility to run a three graphics card setup in SLI mode will most likely be implemented only for the high end 780i and 780a mainboard chipsets, but as the currently used 680i also comes with three installed PCI Express x16 expansion slots, it is very probable that a driver update will appear in order to give it the necessary support for a three-way SLI setup. The later to come 790i chipset is also likely to support the three-way SLI mode and Nvidia even defined it as the ''The Next Generation Ultimate Gaming Platform''.

On Intel compatible mainboards that are based on the Nvidia 780i chipset it is rumored to be an additional chip that acts as a PCI Express bridge and this would only be needed in the case of a multi graphics card setup that uses an odd number of cards. A report announced that this new chip comes with 16x data transferring bandwidth and twp PCI Express x 16 slots, but that it can also be scaled down to four PCIe x8 slots or one x16 slot and two x8 ports.

TAGS:

Nvidia | GeForce | nForce | SLI | mainboard

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