SLi on a 945P?!

[CZroe]

The Fry's ad from Friday very clearly says "nVidia SLi Multi GPU Technology" on their bundle including a motherboard based on the 945P chipset. Knowing that this is an obvious mistake, I asked in store just to see how they would respond: "I noticed that the advertised bundle says that it supports nVidia SLi, but it is not an nVidia chipset motherboard. Did nVidia finally start allowing other motherboards to supports SLi? Does this 945P board really support SLi?"

Their answer?

"Yes. Yes it does."

They were sold out, so there was going to be no box/spec checking.

This calls into question their assertion that the VIA boards they are selling in Quad-Core bundles support Quad-Core... it's not on the box or the supported CPU list on the website, but they assured me that it does and that ECS was notified and that it will be updating shortly. That was two weeks ago.

If I was a tech unsure about the answer to a question based on something curious like that, there's no way in hell I'd assume that the ad is correct. What was he thinking?

 

[Aluvus]

Originally posted by: CZroe
What was he thinking?

Probably that he was less likely to get fired if he just went along with whatever the ad said.

 

[Cutthroat]

LOL, I don't think I've ever actually met anybody in a big box PC store that knew what they were talking about.

 

[Heidfirst]

Originally posted by: CZroe
. Knowing that this is an obvious mistake, I asked in store just to see how they would respond: "I noticed that the advertised bundle says that it supports nVidia SLi, but it is not an nVidia chipset motherboard. Did nVidia finally start allowing other motherboards to supports SLi? Does this 945P board really support SLi?"?

You can run SLI on non-nvidia chipset boards though with hacked drivers - you just can't claim official support or use the term SLI (which I believe is copyright/trademark) without nVidia's approval.

 

[CZroe]

Originally posted by: Heidfirst

Originally posted by: CZroe
. Knowing that this is an obvious mistake, I asked in store just to see how they would respond: "I noticed that the advertised bundle says that it supports nVidia SLi, but it is not an nVidia chipset motherboard. Did nVidia finally start allowing other motherboards to supports SLi? Does this 945P board really support SLi?"?

You can run SLI on non-nvidia chipset boards though with hacked drivers - you just can't claim official support or use the term SLI (which I believe is copyright/trademark) without nVidia's approval.

I was aware that this was possible with VERY early drivers, a motherboard mod, and an ALi chipset motherboard utility, but those are all obsolete. If there is still a way to do it, where can I find the information?

 

[Heidfirst]

well, you can run it e.g. on an abit AW9D (bundle even includes an SLI bridge) a hacked 80 series driver (haven't seen later so no 8xxx card support). http://www.overclock3d.net/rev...socket_775_motherboard

SLI or Crossfire support is pretty much all in the gfx driver with minimal BIOS work required.