Tuesday, October 25, 2005

NVIDIA’s Multi-GPU Tech Operates on Intel 955X Platform – Experiment. NVIDIA’s SLI Can Function on Intel’s Platforms, But with Appropriate Drivers

2:08 pm | Anton Shilov

Although ATI’s CrossFire multi-GPU technology support was officially implemented for the 955X chipset, operation of two NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards has been still impossible for the Intel core logic solutions. But even though there is no official support for the SLI technology on core-logic sets from Intel Corp., some enthusiasts still manage to make NVIDIA’s multi-GPU work on Intel 955X-based mainboards.

Enthusiast Manages to Start the SLI on Intel 955X

A Russian hardware enthusiast from the forums of Overclockers.ru web-cite has managed to enable SLI support on ASUS P5WD2 Premium mainboard. In order to make two NVIDIA GeForce 6600 GT work in SLI tandem on the ASUS P5WD2 Premium, the enthusiast known as Big_Sam flashed BIOS version 0519, set “PCI Express 4x” mode for the second graphics slot from the BIOS, connected the boards using MIO connector and installed ForceWare 66.72 drivers dated October, 2004, with SLI benefits available in a very restricted number of applications.

The latest BIOS version 0519 for this mainboard officially enabled only ATI’s multi-GPU CrossFire support, but, apparently, also allows running the platform built on it in the SLI mode provided that a special NVIDIA ForceWare drivers that lack check capability for supported platforms are installed.

Having installed a pair GeForce 6600 GT graphics cards in with Intel Pentium 4 660 processor and 1GB of memory, the experimenter managed to somewhat improve the system performance. In 3DMark03 testing suite he reached 13 427 points, or 50% higher compared with what a single GeForce 6600 GT graphics card could provide.

Drivers Limit Platform Support

Theoretically, there are no technical problems with enabling operation of CrossFire or SLI multi-GPU technologies on any applications that have two PCI Express slots for graphics cards, but developers of CATALYST and ForceWare drivers have implemented functionality that checks whether a particular platform has been verified by the driver development. In case a platform is not officially supported, the driver does not allow multi-GPU configuration to operate.

An ASUS representative is reported to have said that at this point all the questions about SLI support on Intel’s chipsets are solely up to NVIDIA: there are no hardware limitations in Intel chipsets or mainboards based on them that could prevent from having SLI up and running.

ForceWare drivers Release 65 were released in October, 2004, to support multi-GPU SLI technology, graphics cards with 512MB frame-buffer, improved DirectX 9.0c and OpenGL performance as well as enhanced support for certain video capabilities and HDTV.

The drivers enabled SLI operation on both NVIDIA nForce4 SLI as well as Intel E7525 platforms, but while the former became popular, the latter was used only by Alienware in a handful of systems it managed sold. It is unclear whether the driver did not have an ability to check for supporting platform, or just checked for physical availability of two electrical PCI Express x16 slots. In addition to ForceWare drivers 66.72, which are, according to some web-sites, WHQL certified, there is also version 66.93, which was officially released by NVIDIA Corp.

• Overclockers.ru: ASUS P5W2D Can Work in SLI: First Experiments. 
• Softpedia: NVIDIA ForceWare 66.72 Download.
• NVIDIA.com: NVIDIA ForceWare 66.93 Download.
• NVIDIA ForceWare 66.93 Release Notes.

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