Nvidia To Bring Native SLI to Intel X58 mainboards

In the tradition of Murphy's law of course the most interesting news releases are released once you actually have physically left a trade-show -- that's what I call a Phys-X factor ;)

You return home from an 11 hour flight, and bam .. a PDF file in the email from NVIDIA that makes you wanna bitch-slap some people over at NVIDIA. So it should be no secret that Nvidia earlier on already announced plans to bring its SLI multi-GPU technology to the upcoming Bloomfield platform from Intel, based upon the Nehalem CPU, this was announced already in June/July.

Now here's the schocking fact .. there's giving support without the nForce 200 chip which for example is used on Skulltrail. That literally means native 2 and 3-way SLI support on upcoming high-end Intel X58 based motherboards.

One dowside for the mainboard manufacturers. The mainboard manufacturer will have to submit the mainboard to NVIDIA for certification (done by them) and then provides a BIOS allowing SLI in which the graphcis card driver can properly detect the corresponding device ID.

What's so interesting about this ? Well, it fianlly means we'll see mainboards that both support NVIDIA SLI and ATI's Crossfire. It will be possible to get X58/SLI going with either two or three cards. 3-way SLI + 1 card PhysX acceleration is supported as well.

Nice !