Sli + Crossfire - There Can Be Only One

[Davros]

Am I right in thinking that there is no technical reason why a mboard cant support both
its a case of the gfx driver not allowing it to be enabled why are they doing this ?
its certainly not in the consumers interest and isnt there some anti competition law against it
for example i know several times printer makers have tried to stop other companies making ink for their printers and failed isnt this similar ?

chances are both mv + ati have been interviewed by b3d has the question ever been asked ?
have ati or nv ever gave an official reason ?

and now amd have taken over ati how long will we see intel boards supporting crossfire? will it soon be the case that if i want crossfire i will have to buy an amd cpu and if i want sli i will have to buy an intel cpu ?

ps: is anyone working on modified drivers that remove this block ?
and another thing if amd do release open source drivers whats the bets that there will be no crossfire support because they dont want linux users having crossfire on nv boards

[Sobek]

I hate to be blindly simple, but could it be money? I mean, i'm sure all these various companies invest monstrous amounts of cash into securing their little piece of the market, while at the same time making it extremely hard for the competition to do the same. Perhaps Nvidia pays royalties to various manufacturers to either support ONLY their product (though I suspect that would be quite hard to accomplish) or at least support their first and foremost. If that were true, then I could understand why Nvidia would pursue construction of their own motherboards and chipsets...that way they could control what, exactly, their parts support, and not have to pay royalties.

Then again I know absolutely nothing about these kinds of going-ons so this is all just air out of my ass... But I could imagine it being something like that. Also, I don't think any driver is going to circumvent these hardware differences...at least, not without some monumental work and an open source driver workbase (yeah, hahaha, sure). I suppose that's why no one ever got around to getting Crossfire working on SLi motherboards (I really wanted this once).

Am I even anywhere near the ball? Let alone on it...

[digitalwanderer]

I want a driver that will let PCIe cards run on AGP ports.... ;)

[Tim Murray]

A little birdie directed me at this (http://reviews.cnet.com/desktops/hp-blackbird-002/4505-3118_7-32592299.html?tag=box)--Voodoo's new high-end config, with a 680i board and Crossfire 2900XTs. Apparently, they'll validate it for single motherboards, but they won't just say "it works on SLI motherboards." And I doubt they'd ever take the step of saying "here's a driver, maybe it'll work, maybe it won't, try it at your own risk!"

[digitalwanderer]

If you're scratching your head at HP matching two ATI cards in CrossFire mode on an Nvidia NForce 680i SLI motherboard, we did too. We can confirm that it works, and even with older versions of ATI's Catalyst video drivers. Voodoo's Rahul Sood told us that he worked with ATI and Asus to make this cross-standard strategy possible. He wouldn't reveal exactly what changes were made, but the good news is your upgrade options are doubled due to this innovation, as this system now support both ATI's Crossfire and Nvidia's SLI dual-graphics cards. That benefit could also trickle down to the average DIYer. Pending approval from the various vendors involved, the tweaks present in the Blackbird could become publicly available via a software download.
Well I for one am shocked and take back my smarmy comment with most humble apple-polly-loggies. :???:

That's kewl. :cool:

[Tim Murray]

Well I for one am shocked and take back my smarmy comment with most humble apple-polly-loggies. :???:

That's kewl. :cool:
Well, it's happened before--they did it for Dell boxes some months back.

[Davros]

I want a driver that will let PCIe cards run on AGP ports.... ;)
but its not a driver thats stopping you ;)

I am right in thinking that its not hardware preventing both working but the driver deliberately disabling cf/sli on certian boards ?

ps: i hope that it does become common for boards to support both

pps: for those of you who use cf/sli if you couldnt buy a board that supported your choice of cpu + your choice of dual gpu's what sacrifice would you make
change gpu or cpu ?

[Geo]

I was hoping for some time that AMD swallowing ATI would lead to this happening. That it would be harder for NVIDIA (and the old ATI, of course) to say 'no' under such circumstances.

I'm still waiting. . .

[Blazkowicz]

getting X800 PCIe master + X800 AGP slave to run in crossfire on a ULi motherboard with both slots was a nice hack ;)
as for the discussed issue, it has always been about selling more expensive chipsets and mobos, I guess 90% or more people with SLI/crossfire mobo never use that feature.
Incompatibility is one more reason to avoid it, spend a bit less and get one more PCI slot :razz: