SLI, a method of sharing the graphics load between certain nVidia video cards, to achieve greater performance (.e.g. Divide and Conquer), is something that nets nVidia $5 each time a motherboard maker wants to include the ability in any of its motherboards. That is $5 per board. Not a bad deal.
The word is that the company gets more in the case of 3-way SLI, or quad-SLI, and is more picky with the quad systems, choosing only to assess and certify higher end products. This is a good idea for you, as trying to track down problems at this level would be nearly impossible, and if you could identify the problem, chances are good you could do nothing about it. But it is also very profitable for nVidia – they evaluate one board of each type, and leave the individual troubles with boards to the board maker. Unless the manufacturer makes a bunch of stinker boards, it’s all upside for nVidia, and no downside, their part of the work is already done. It’s all gravy at that point.
Now, it has been announced that some enterprising Ukranians have cracked the code of SLI, and are able to enable SLI in any board they have tried.
from bsn
We just got contacted by a friend of the site that inform us that the crew over at Ukrainian xDev website managed to reverse engineer the SLI verification procedure and now SLI works everywhere. In case you didn’t knew, nVidia charges motherboard vendors five dollars [US$5] per motherboard if the motherboard is to support GeForce SLI. In terms of Quadro SLI, the company charges more and it only certifies complete systems, rather than motherboards. We suspect that this is what keeps an iron fist on the Quadro board market, where nVidia captured over 90% of the market.
But the main issue with SLI is the fact that there aren’t many AMD motherboards on the market supporting SLI, and renaming nForce 780a into 980a SLI was well… a closely followed pattern by nVidia in the past 24 months, with more rebrands than new ASICs.
Well, not anymore. According to xDev website, they found two ways how to activate SLI on ALL multi-GPU supporting motherboards, regardless of the chipset in place [but you have to have a minimum of two closed or open-ended PCIe slots fitting the graphics cards].
They’ve tried and tested SLI on 16 motherboards, from the oldest P965 and P35 to new AMD 790X chipsets and it worked every time. From graphics cards side, the team had pairings of nVidia GeForce 6600LE, 6800Ultra, 7900GS, 8800GTX, 9800GT, 9800GTX, GTX260-192, GTX260-216 and GTX285. The guys checked to see if their method works on 32-bit versions of Windows XP, Vista & 7 and 64-bit versions of Vista and Windows 7. In each and every case, the SLI worked.
Now, there are two ways to achieve this hack. From one side, you can use modified drivers but that method requires a hacking and tweaking each and every time you install a new driver. But there is a second method that allows you to install newer drivers – by replacing HAL [Hardware Abstraction Layer] and cheating the operating system about the motherboard chipset you have. Even though operating systems work in general, this experiment might result in a non-bootable system. In that case, do a simple reboot or perhaps even have your installation crash.
You can read the whole guide in this following link: xDev: Activating SLI on all motherboards, detailed HOW-TO. In the end, the credit goes to the author and programmer of modification SveetSnelda, and anatolymik for modifying the HAL.dll.
coming soon to more motherboards near you?
This is very cool for many, especially, as they say in the story, AMD CPU lovers, who also happen to not like ATi video cards. nVidia drivers are much more reliable, and so allowing SLI on an AMD chipset motherboard doesn’t happen often enough. When it does, it’s either on boards with short warranties, and difficulty with warranty performance claims, like AsRock, or are much more expensive, like Asus models.
This really makes things nice for the AMD crowd, and means that nVidia can be used in tandem or greater, on many more boards, increasing performance, while reducing total cost for the owner.
What remains to be seen is whether nVidia, will actively pursue the quashing of this, or count itself lucky, because that many more nVidia graphics boards will be sold overall.
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