Will 2 ati cards in Xfire work on nVidia Sli Board?

Mar 27, 2007
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I have a m2n32-sli motherboard, it has 2x pci-express x16 slots. I am considering buying two 4850 vid cards for a xfire setup but am not sure if a xfire setup will work on the 590 chipset. Does anyone know for sure if it will or will not?
 

Ike0069

Diamond Member
Apr 28, 2003
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You can get dual 9800GTX's for the basically the same price. Very close in performance until you get 8xAA. I think the 4850 is the better buy; but if you want dual cards w/out getting a new MB, nVidia is your only choice.

Realize each 9800 requires two pci-e connectors vice the single connector for the 4850 and has a dual slot cooler if that matters.
 
Mar 27, 2007
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i would just get a 9800gx2 but it needs a pci express 8 pin connector?? my psu only has 2x 6 pin connectors and im worried a simple 6 to 8 pin converter wont work due to some loss of required electrics. :(

im not sure i can afford a new vid card + psu or new vid card + mobo. dam you nividia!!! i may be going to a full amd system in the near future.

im pissed that nvidia has come out with cards that require not only 450-650 dollars to purchase for great performance but also require you to buy a new 150+ dollar psu. wth
 

aka1nas

Diamond Member
Aug 30, 2001
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ATI support was claiming that it would work when I asked them pre-merger, and that they did not do any sort of chipset limitation via the driver. I've never seen a review site actually test it on an Nforce chipset to verify that it wouldn't work.
 

Nathelion

Senior member
Jan 30, 2006
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It will not work.

It is, however, entirely true that AMD/ATI don't have any mechanisms in place to prevent it from working. The issue is that nVidia requires their partners to implement a BIOS lock-out that disables peer-to-peer PCIe writes on nVidia chipsets when non-nVidia cards are in the system. It can be, and has been, hacked... but sites that post instructions and/or hacked BIOSes tend to be taken down in short order. Besides, nVidia has historically been at the top of the performance heap more often than not (and, more importantly, SLI has historically outperformed CF), so most of the effort that has been put into this sort of thing has gone towards making SLI run on non-nVidia boards (which is another single-sided nVidia-introduced incompatibility).

Now Diamond was talking about enabling CF to run on any chipset with Diamond graphics cards late last year... but there is exactly zero mention of it anywhere other than the initial press releases. Google "Diamond xDNA" and you'll get a handful of hits, all dating from the initial announcement. It could be worth e-mailing Diamond tech support and asking if they actually implemented this feature, or if the were *cough* "convinced" to silently drop the entire project.