Motherboard
Asus A8N32 SLix16I know congo said there was a bug in the chipset, but not one that I have seen and the board gets pretty good reviews so I wouldn't be too worried about it (Congo if you have a better SLi x16 board do tell).
I've tried to explain this before, but here goes again....
First of all, SLI is for people who have too much money and can't figure out how to burn it fast enough. You don't need it, period.
ctjoyce (and much of the PC world) is under the impression that there is some benefit in having 16 PCI express lanes available per PCIe slot in an SLI rig.
In the first round of SLI mainboards, the 16x lanes of PCIe bus normally used by a single card were split into 2 during SLI mode, resulting in 8 lanes per card or 16 lanes total. Each PCIe lane allows a certain amount of graphics data traffic to pass along it. In the new chipset, 16 lanes are available for each card in SLI mode.
This modification was not based on need, there is plenty of PCIe bus bandwidth anyway with 16x in single mode or 2x8 in SLI mode, this situation is not likely to change in the near future.
In other words, in the dubious SLI mode (oh my, there's a new card out that makes my SLI rig look sick, why on earth did I just spend a fortune on 2 cards when this one beats them anyway) there is no bottleneck on the PCIe bus.
Now when nVidia made the change, there was a tradeoff..... the 16x2 PCIe lanes required the bitrate be halved on the Front Side Bus in one direction, hence bottlenecking the front side bus. Again this was not serious because the Front side bus has plenty of bandwidth....... or does it? In reality, the FSB will run out of steam well before the PCIe bus needs more bandwidth....ie. it's not a balanced chipset.
The explanation above may not be entirely accurate in detail, because I haven't gone back to the info to refresh myself on it yet, but essentially it is accurate in it's end result.
Tested side by side, (the old SLI boards and the new ones like ctjoyce is recommending), the old original SLI board is actually faster by a small margin, this result comes because the buses are not running at full capacity quite yet on current software.
When a game or application arrives that uses a lot of FSB bandwidth, the new SLI 16x chipset could be in for some serious bottlenecking, until then, the problem remains invisible and people are buying a defective board with little ill effect, for now.
Ok, so we have an over expensive mainboard with dubious SLI support enabling dubious amounts of PCIe lanes at the expense of Front Side Bus lanes. They are fine board, as long as it's not in my PC thankyou....
In answer to the "what 16x SLI board is good" I say none. Just buy an older SLI board if you want the features it offers and stick a single card on it or buy an NF4 Ultra board. Simple and cheap.
I honestly do not know why nVidia released this chipset other than that they were under pressure to do so, personally, I feel it was a bad decision, but it may have been in response to ULI's release of a 16x2 SLI chipset.
nVidia has since bought ULI. Possibly a very smart move.
The ULI chipset is worth a look, Asrock use it in some well featured, slightly slower and very cheap mainboards.
Posted: Thu Mar 23, 2006 9:01 am
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