Nemesis11
Power Member
Last week at NVIDIAs editors’ day I spent some time talking to DFI, a 2nd Tier Taiwanese mainboard vendor, who have recently been working hard to break into the enthusiast market, something which we have seen strong support for.
We have learnt that NVIDIA needed to pick key partners in order to develop SLI. They decided to worked with the 'big 3' - in the form of MSI, ASUS, and Gigabyte. These three worked with NVIDIA in order to build the reference solution and following that to iron out the original bugs, both silicon and electrical. As a result you will probably see a lot of similarity in these manufacturers' boards over the coming months.
NVIDIA also released SLI chipsets to the other mainboard vendors but did not provide the same level of direction and support, which should hopefully lead to some more varied products.
In our extensive SLi coverage we showed the bridge ‘PCB’ connector and the physical 'SODIMM' selection PCB. This allows the user to select single or dual graphics cards. Over the past few years we have seen more and more migration from hardware based tweaks to BIOS integration so this sudden reversal was a surprise to us.
However, from our conversations with several tier 2 vendors we have learnt that there other board vendors have decided to take a different approach and are attempting to allow the selection to be performed in the BIOS.
DFI have also reported to us that you do not need the additional PCB bridge, which NVIDIA claims to pump 1GB/s throughput, apparently this can be run via the board. We are dubious about this, but we are interested in seeing the performance hit on this change. We know that the PCI-E bus is capable of running high bandwidth graphics (Alienwares original ALX video array technology).
Since the official launch of SLi it has become apparent that NVIDIA have launched an initiative to help 'control' and provide support to SLI. This is in the form of a validation suite, people can submit boards, chipsets and other parts to their SLi program to check to see if it conforms.
This solution from DFI does not appear to be within the SLI guidelines which are outlined by NVIDIA and the top 3 motherboard vendors. But will we see NVIDIA validate it? Only time will tell. All we know for sure is that DFI will be launching this technology under their own XLi brand.
http://www.hexus.net/
One of the interesting things we saw was DFI’s implementation of SLI- they’re planning on using the nForce4 ultra chipset which does not offer SLI support and yet provide the ability to run an SLI setup. They are doing this by having a standard x16 PCI-E slot and another x4 PCI-E slot. According to them, the performance difference is SLI mode will be less than 5% while the cost of this chipset compared to the SLI chipset will be about $20 less- certainly a big difference. MSI will also be making a motherboard with the nForce4 ultra chipset in an SLI form.
http://www.tbreak.com/reviews/printpage.php?id=340
Resumo:
A nVidia escolheu 3 parceiros (os 3 grandes, Asus, Msi, Gigabyte) para lançar o SLi, as outras marcas para terem um produto no mercado estão a tentar contornar a situação.
No caso da DFi XLi as diferenças são:
- Uso da nForce 4 Ultra em vez da nForce 4 SLi.
- Não há a "bridge" entre as duas graficas. A comunicação e feita pelo PciEx.
- Alterar entre SLi e non-SLi é feito na bios em vez de ser pelo SODIMM na motherboard.
- As lanes nas PciEx são fixas em 16x para uma grafica e 4x para a outra em vez de 16x + 0x em non SLi e 8x + 8x em SLi na nForce4 SLi.
- Redução de 5% (?) Dados da DFi.
- Fica-se por saber como é que eles têm 2 PciEx 1x, quando o limite do ***** é 20 lanes.
- Como não deve ser certificada pela nVidia (ainda se está para ver), lançam um produto à parte chamado XLi.
A board é esta:
De referir que não é novidade uma empresa escolher certas marcas para o lançamento de um *****. A AMD só trabalhou com a Tyan para o lançamento da 760 MP e as outras marcas só tiveram acesso ao 760 MPX, que era uma revisão do *****.
Boa ideia da DFi ou nem por isso?
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