It appears that after the NVISION event, which took place on August 25-27 in San Jose, California, NVIDIA gathered a number of reporters to disclose a rather surprising business decision. The company seemingly plans to enable its SLI multi-GPU technology for upcoming X58-based motherboards, without the need of the nForce 200 PCI Express bridge chip. This should come as great news to any user out there who has been considering pairing NVIDIA's latest GeForce graphics cards with Intel's yet-to-be-released X58 mobos.

As most of you already know, the X58 platforms will be designed to support Intel's upcoming Core i7 processors based on the Nehalem technology. The new X58 boards will boast Intel's next generation LGA1366 socket that will allow users to make the most of the power of the upcoming Core i7 CPUs. Up until now, motherboard manufacturers could enable SLI for an X58-powered mobo by integrating NVIDIA's nForce 200 chip, which was rumored to cost approximately $30.

According to the Director of Technical Market for MCP products, Tom Peterson, the company has reconsidered its initial strategy, which would have only permitted SLI support for a small number of very high end motherboards, while mainstream X58-based products would have been left without NVIDIA's SLI technology.

Unfortunately, there's one catch. Despite not having to pay the extra $30 for SLI support thanks to the nForce 200 chipset, motherboard makers will have to license their products by submitting the board for testing at NVIDIA's Santa Clara certification lab. The certification will not be free but, after the board is certified, its manufacturer will receive an approval key (called “cookie”) that must be embedded in the system BIOS. This "cookie" will enable SLI support in NVIDIA's ForceWare drive software. On the other hand, the Santa Clara-based chip maker has admitted that some users will likely hack the BIOS of non-certified X58 boards and add “cookies,” thus enabling SLI without NVIDIA certification.

The company also announced that it didn’t plan to leave the chipset business entirely, and would continue to develop core-logic products for other Intel platforms.