[vIrUs_32]

I'm thinking of buying an sli compatible motherboard and was looking at this gigabyte model ----> http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128358 <------ in the specifications it says that the motherboard supports two pcie x16 2.0 slots, but one of them is running at x8 model. i'm not sure what this means, does it mean if i buy a second 8800 gtx and put in sli, does it mean that the 8800 gtx will only work at 50% of it's potential? Can anyone give me any advice on this? any will be appreciated! thanks! :wave:

 

[Wrench97]

That is a crossfire motherboard so you be able to SLI on a Intel chip set.
X8 means it runs at half the bandwidth full being x16 but considering how poorly the nvidia cards scale up it would not make a lot of difference even if it could run SLI

It is an excellent motherboard however if you consider a single large nvidia card(9800Gx2 or GTX280) or ATI HD4850's or a HD 4870.

 

[vIrUs_32]

no i'm looking to sli my 8800 gtx and get i married xD. so this mobo isn't the best for sli'ing eh? can you recommend one?

 

[Wrench97]

The only options at the moment are a nvidia 7xx series which are buggy and troublesome or the x58 which is a socket 1366 intel chip set and I haven't seen any reviews on how well
they work in SLI yet

 

[vIrUs_32]

your teling me there are NO good sli boards out there? you've gotta be ****tin me lol.

 

[Wrench97]

The 4 series was great and they have been going down hill ever since the 6 series was bearable but the 7series is buggy everything from random blue screens freeze ups at different times for 1-2 seconds google 780i problems and 790i problems I have 1 on a shelf downstairs that Crucial sent me 12 different pairs of sticks just to get it to boot tried Crucial OCZ and Gskil finally got it to boot correctly would.n load windows rma it second board ran on the 1st 2 sticks of crucial but froze every 3 minutes you could set your watch by it rma it again 3rd board would not run on the either of the 4 sticks the previous 2 would stuck some 533 kingston in it ran fine loaded windows couldn't find the 8800gt to load the drivers to I ended up giving the guy a P35 DS3R he's been happy ever since

 

[vIrUs_32]

p35 ds3r.....is that an sli board? and i'm not talking about just nvidia xxxi boards, i'm talking about ANY sli board. what would be the best one from your experience?

 

[Wrench97]

Intel boards are Crossfire not SLI

 

[vIrUs_32]

i thought amd boards were crossfire(amd/ati). intel and nvidia boards should be sli. damn this sucks.

 

[Wrench97]

Intel up to the X58 could not come to an agreement with Nvidia over license fees but I hear Nvidia is getting out of the chipset market after the 7xx series so had give Intel the license to do it so up until now AMD and Intel were Xfire and Nvidia was SL,I SIS and Via have not been doing either.
I was expecting to see a X58 SLI review by now but haven't so far.