CrossFire on 680i SLI mobo?

[airhendrix13]

Can it be done?

And while I'm here, will there be any bandwidth limitations with the newest gen cards on a PCI-E 1.1 16x slot?

Thanks

 

[MTDEW]

Can it be done?

- Short answer...No it cant be done, don't bother trying it.

 

[aka1nas]

AMD claims that you can, but I have never seen a review site actually test it.

 

[LOUISSSSS]

didn't HP do it?

 

[MTDEW]

The only time ive ever seen it actually done was on an HP Blackbird.
http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2...crossfire_on_nforce_/1

 

[MTDEW]

Originally posted by: LOUISSSSS
didn't HP do it?

LOL
Yes, was posting as you typed.

 

[Blazer7]

Originally posted by: airhendrix13

will there be any bandwidth limitations with the newest gen cards on a PCI-E 1.1 16x slot?

Thanks

I'm using 2 ASUS EN8800GTS512 TOP edition cards (factory oced) on my GA-N680SLI-DQ6 rev 1 mobo and everything is working fine. No performance penalties from the PCI-E 1.1 slots.

AFAIK even the latest cards do not max out the bandwidth of the 1.1 slots so there shouldn't be any bandwidth limitations. At least not yet.

 

[sgrinavi]

Originally posted by: MTDEW

Can it be done?

- Short answer...No it cant be done, don't bother trying it.

Crossfire does not depend on the chipset, so long as you have two PCIe slots is should be fine.

 

[Blazer7]

Originally posted by: sgrinavi

Originally posted by: MTDEW

Can it be done?

- Short answer...No it cant be done, don't bother trying it.

Crossfire does not depend on the chipset, so long as you have two PCIe slots is should be fine.

Probably you're right but you'll still gonna need a modified BIOS and that's definitely a bad idea. I've heard of some guy that used an HP BIOS on a striker extreme but I wouldn't wanna try this myself. You know what they say. If it isn't broken leave it alone.

 

[will889]

No one is actually doing this legally - it would be sort of like the hackintosh project. The NF200 SLI chipset would have to be "emulated" in the hacked bios for crossfire to work and it's a proprietary thing IIRC. Even then crossfire would likely not have full performance support (my guess).

But yes it would be nice, and also be nice for crossfire boards to be able to SLI. I hate the proprietary BS.

 

[airhendrix13]

Hmmm... well if Crossfire is possible on a SLI mobo, then the 4870 would be much more attractive for me, but if you need a modified BIOS, then it isn't worth it.

 

[LOUISSSSS]

Originally posted by: sgrinavi

Originally posted by: MTDEW

Can it be done?

- Short answer...No it cant be done, don't bother trying it.

Crossfire does not depend on the chipset, so long as you have two PCIe slots is should be fine.

can you tell us how you can get crossfire 4870's on a nvidia 780i motherboard?

 

[Sylvanas]

Originally posted by: sgrinavi

Originally posted by: MTDEW

Can it be done?

- Short answer...No it cant be done, don't bother trying it.

Crossfire does not depend on the chipset, so long as you have two PCIe slots is should be fine.

No, this is wrong. Let it be known now to put away any future question on the subject (disregarding Skulltrail here obviously) Crossfire does not work on Nvidia chipsets. SLI does not work on Crossfire chipsets

Yes, there used to be hack drivers but they have since fallen out of existence and were for very early 6/7 series nvidia cards based on really old drivers. As for a 3rd party doing it....thats what they claimed, but such a product has never made it to market.

 

[TC91]

Actually i think it is quite possible if you had one of the older bios, since the newer ones i do believe will not allow anything other than a second identical card in the second pci-express slot (i couldnt move my card down to the second slot since the system wouldnt boot, the bios gave me an error and told me to make sure the card was in the first slot). Too bad no reviewers have actually tested it. For the pci-express slots, you can oc them to 125mhz and make the mcp>spp HT clock to 251mhz (this is basically enabling linkboost manually). I have my pci-express slots running @ 125mhz atm, and according to everest, the bios locks the sata clock to 100mhz and the netwroking to 125mhz so you shouldnt have a problem with data corruption.

for the crossfire thing, they got it to work on nforce 4 boards so far...
http://www.firingsquad.com/new...icle.asp?searchid=9051
http://www.rahulsood.com/2005/...makes-sense-to-me.html
http://www.ocforums.com/archive/index.php/t-552975.html

 

[Sylvanas]

Originally posted by: TC91
Actually i think it is quite possible if you had one of the older bios, since the newer ones i do believe will not allow anything other than a second identical card in the second pci-express slot (i couldnt move my card down to the second slot since the system wouldnt boot, the bios gave me an error and told me to make sure the card was in the first slot). Too bad no reviewers have actually tested it. For the pci-express slots, you can oc them to 125mhz and make the mcp>spp HT clock to 251mhz (this is basically enabling linkboost manually). I have my pci-express slots running @ 125mhz atm, and according to everest, the bios locks the sata clock to 100mhz and the netwroking to 125mhz so you shouldnt have a problem with data corruption.

for the crossfire thing, they got it to work on nforce 4 boards so far...
http://www.firingsquad.com/new...icle.asp?searchid=9051
http://www.rahulsood.com/2005/...makes-sense-to-me.html
http://www.ocforums.com/archive/index.php/t-552975.html

It is the driver not the Bios that determines if the two cards in question qualify for SLI/Crossfire- that's how ATI and Nvidia initiate their lockout and how they (modders) used to mod the drivers to achieve SLI on early Intel chipsets. Also raising the PCI-E bus speed has nothing to do with the ability to run SLI/Crossfire. Again, those links you posted are all news snippets of 'well this is to come' 'We think it is possible' yet nothing ever eventuated, if the Diamond Xna cards did what they said they did there would have been many reviews and discussion not just a crystal ball prediction- as for Nforce4...that was a long time ago and we are talking 680i here .

 

[TC91]

@Sylvanas yeah, yeah i know its old but just thought i should bring it up

And for the pci-express slot, yeah it has nothing to do with running crossfire/sli (should have separated that from the rest of my post) but the OP did ask about it being a potential bottleneck so i thought i should share my experience with oc'ing it.

I don't think the drivers for crossfire determine the chipset, since it works on practically every intel board (and nforce 4) with 2 pci-express slots (correct me if im wrong) and i am pretty sure (not 100%) the ati drivers don't look for the chipset. But the nvidia display drivers do definately look for the cards + chipset.

 

[airhendrix13]

Thanks everyone for clearing that stuff up! Now I know that my 680i won't bottleneck the newest gen cards and I got confirmation about Crossfire on an SLI mobo. Thanks all!

 

[sgrinavi]

Originally posted by: airhendrix13
Thanks everyone for clearing that stuff up! Now I know that my 680i won't bottleneck the newest gen cards and I got confirmation about Crossfire on an SLI mobo. Thanks all!

You got confirmation?

 

[codyz2035]

from what i've heard you should be able to do it. AMD unlike nvidia doesn't really ristrict what chipset you must use in order to use crossfire. with two nvidia graphics cards you HAVE TO HAVE a nvidia based motherboard chipset. but not with ati. as long as you have a PSU that can handle crossfire configurations, a couple PCI-E x16 slots then you should be fine.

 

[Blazer7]

It ain't that easy. There're only SLI parameters in the BIOS of SLI mobos. Even if you hack/modify/replace the BIOS there's no guaranty that CF will work without problems if at all. Besides, if it was that easy there would have been many cases of people with CF configs on SLI mobos but that ain't the case. There may have been some isolated cases at the most but that's it.

The only way I can think of where one could possibly succeed in enabling CF on an SLI mobo is with the support of the mobo maker and that's impossible as all these guys have contracts with nV that will most likely forbid them of even thinking of enabling CF on nV based mobos.