News Nvidia denies planned MCP exit

[CardJoe]

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2008/08...ned-mcp-exit/1

Nvidia has denied rumours started by Digitimes that it is to quit the motherboard chipset market in favour of concentrating on its graphics card technologies.

[[USRF]Obiwan]

I said it before and again. SLI and CrossFire setups are useless because within a year there is a new single card that out weights the expensive SLI / CF setup. Secondly the consumer choice is very restrictive, you either choose a mobo with SLI support or CF support. A better way is no SLI/CF controller on the motherboard at all and let two or more cards work with each other another way. Remember the 3DFX voodoo cards you could link up. You did not need any special motherboard for those.

[kylew]

Originally Posted by [USRF

Obiwan]I said it before and again. SLI and CrossFire setups are useless because within a year there is a new single card that out weights the expensive SLI / CF setup. Secondly the consumer choice is very restrictive, you either choose a mobo with SLI support or CF support. A better way is no SLI/CF controller on the motherboard at all and let two or more cards work with each other another way. Remember the 3DFX voodoo cards you could link up. You did not need any special motherboard for those.

You don't need 'special' boards for crossfire to run, the only requirement is to have the right PCI-E slots. It's nVidia that want to make people buy their own SLi boards to run SLi.

While I disagree that dual GPUs are pointless, I think that when some one buys the top end graphics cards and runs them in crossfire/SLI modes, that is pointless as you'd be paying a huge amount for something you don't really need and wouldn't see the benefits of until way down the line, when a single card comes out that's faster or at least just as fast.

Midrange cards though? Definately. I think the 4850s have been some of the best cards to come out since I got into computers.

They're cheap but very fast, and when combined in crossfire, blow away nVidia's cards for even less of the cost. Or the 9600GTs, they worked very well in SLi, and were fairly cheap to buy two of too.

[mclean007]

Originally Posted by [USRF

Obiwan]...the consumer choice is very restrictive, you either choose a mobo with SLI support or CF support. A better way is no SLI/CF controller on the motherboard at all and let two or more cards work with each other another way....

There is no SLI/CF controller on motherboards - the PCI-E standard is used for communications between cards on both dual/multi-GPU implementations. The trouble is a driver issue - nVidia artificially prohibits the nForce drivers from enabling SLi on non-nVidia chipsets. I'm sure I've heard of Crossfire running on nVidia boards, but why would you spend the extra for a SLi board if you didn't plan to run SLi? - better just to get e.g. an Intel P45 or X48 or whatever.

[azrael-]

As far as I know a special "controller" isn't really necessary, either for CrossFire or SLI. That's one of the reasons that Intel chipsets can do CrossFire. I believe EPoX even managed to make both CrossFire and SLI run on a i945 chipset some time back. HP/Voodoo have done something similar with the Blackbird 02 system (although I believe it's based around a custom version of the ASUS Striker mobo).

That being said I find that nVidia chipsets have been quite innovative in the past. However, this innovation has always come with a number of bugs, which nVidia usually can't be bothered fixing. The prime example for that would be the NV firewall. Great idea, bad execution. How they ever got it certified by ICSA Labs with all those obvious flaws is beyond me. I, personally, have also had other problems with my nForce3 and nForce4 mobos (malfunctioning USB ports for instance). Never had similar problems with Intel chipsets. I have no first-hand experience with AMD chipsets, although I'm bound to get some, since I've recently built a HTPC around a 780G mobo for a friend.

[Gunsmith]

Originally Posted by [USRF

Obiwan]I said it before and again. SLI and CrossFire setups are useless because within a year there is a new single card that out weights the expensive SLI / CF setup.

bullshit bingo!

[ParaHelix.org]

Buy what you want, keep it to yourself, and shut the **** up about it.

[Amon]

Hmm, I never suspected that nVidia was planning on evacuating the MCP before Tron arrived.

[ZERO <ibis>]

So Tron is coming!

I like the nvidia chipsets not just because of the sli but also other advancements such as ESA which I think is very useful for overclocking and overall system integration.

[Redbeaver]

i love nforce. not only for SLI but for other things too.

but no, i dont use ntune.