SLI and AMD, Xfire and Intel

[THERESONATOR]

Is there any performance impact when one chooses to run two nVidia cards in SLI on an AMD socket motherboard? Any impact when one chooses to run Xfire on Intel socket motherboards? I read that ideally its best to run AMD with Xfire, and Intel with SLI. Any truth to this? I particularly refer to the latest high end graphics cards such as the HD3870 or 8800/9900.

 

[lyssword]

if you have 2 video cards..
nvidia cards: only on nvidia chipset

amd cards: run on xfire, intel chipsets

 

[THERESONATOR]

Could you give that some more clarity please?

 

[lyssword]

if you want 2 nvidia vid cards to work together, you have to buy a motherboard that says NForce SLI in its name somewhere.

If you want 2 ati/amd video cards to work together you have to buy a motherboard hat has 2 pci-x16 slots. Those could have either amd, intel motherboard chipsets with "crossfire" somewhere in their name.

Sorry I have researched and apparently sli mobos won't let you run crossfire read this http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/article/391/1

To answer your original question: no, doesnt' matter what cpu socket is in the motherboard, it all depends on the chipset of the motherboard, so if you have similarly powered amd cpu and similarly powered intel cpu, if they have same chipset I'd expect their performance to be equal.

 

[nullpointerus]

The chipsets are quite capable of running either SLI or CF: the problem is licensing, not performance.

As lyssword said, you need a nVidia motherboard for SLI and an AMD motherboard for CF...
...additionally, Intel has licensed CF, so Intel motherboards will work fine with CF. :thumbsup:

SLI disables use of more than one monitor whereas CF enables up to four monitors.