MSI's 'digital' SLI bridge revealed

http://bit-tech.net/feature/86/

 

Are there any plans for this implementation to be used on the AMD NF4 chipset boards?

 

Cheers

 

so will these work for like x850's?

 

No, it's an NVIDIA NForce 4 SLI Intel Edition motherboard, ATI's cards do not have capabilities for multi-video card rendering at the moment, whether it be hardware or software capability.

 

I really don't see the point.... if you can't figure out how to set up SLI you shouldn't be using it. Flip the selector card (or move the jumper blocks if it's the DFI), add second card, add bridge, hit power button, install drivers, click SLI checkbox. I managed to do it without needing to remove my mobo from the case, and had I not been changing the graphics card at the time anyways wouldn't have needed to take out the primary card.

Seems like it would just be another thing that could fail... the physical lane relocation is a lot less likely to fry or something.

 

As cards get faster and actually utilise the full bandwidth provided by the PCI-e x16 bus, wouldn't the SLi information reduce the maximum bus speed as it no longer has it's own bridge to converse over?

 

x2 - seems that way - the cards would be communicating using the board as a medium instead of talking directly to each other.

 

just to straighten something out... the bridge that we are referring to here is the bridge that changes the operating modes. The conventional hard digital switch is shown in this picture:



The video cards still require the interlink across the top of the two cards if you are talking about NVIDIA SLI. ATI's Multi-GPU implementation doesn't exist yet, but it is rumoured to work without an interlink between the two cards passing all data between the PCI-Express interconnect.

 

Yeah, presumably they'll only work with ATI's PCIE chipset as well.

-Xp- yes, you're right, but by the time that happens, the chipsets will most likely have 40 pipelines so each can get the full x16 (plus probably 2 x1 slots, an x4, and the other two for GigaLAN or RAID controllers). Remember, we still haven't saturated AGP, and even an x8 PCIE slot has twice as much bandwidth as AGP8 (since it's 2GB/sec up, 2GB/sec down, vs 2.1(?)GB either/or, something like that anyways)

 

Ahh I see - I thougt that the bridge replaced the interlink

 

Nah, that little daughterboard that links the card just keeps the data in sync between the cards. I'd assume it's more critical for SFR than AFR, but I've never pulled mine out

The card/bridge we're referring to is the thing that physically (or now digitally I suppose, maybe physically at a microscopic level) rearranges the PCI Express lanes... the SO-DIMM type card in bigz' pic

 

unless they can make it more compact, i'd rather just have the card + two extra pci-e 1x slots.

 

Unfortunately, that motherboard's SATA interface doesn't seem to be in the way of graphics cards, so it can't be taken seriously....

EDIT:
Just wanted to clarify that this is a joke, as it seems all nice motherboards have hard drive interfaces beneath the video card slots.