Nvidia Motherboard Help

[The Munster]

Hi, hope somebody here can help me with this, how do I find out if my Nvidia Motherboard is SLI ready, supports a PCI Express chipset and dual x16 connectors for two NVIDIA PCI Express graphics cards. I have a Nvidia Graphics Card and the Nvidia Control Panel but I can only get basic information from it. I don't really want to open my 'can of worms' and stick a torch in to find out. Cheers.

[AVGWarhawk]

I'm not sure if the mb matters. I believe the cards need to be SLI ready. Don't quote me on that! I have an Nvida mb and 6200 card. The card is SLI ready and said so when I installed it.

[Perilscope]

...how do I find out if my Nvidia Motherboard is SLI ready,
If you have two video slots on the MB, you can have two video cards.

However, you need to have two video cards ready for working together (SLI, Crossfire), you can't just shove two video cards in there...
All these can be answered if you search a bit on the companies respective websites.:D

[Iceman]

Yea the mb needs to support SLI...goto nvidia and read up and google about SLI....it has to be setup properly or it won't work....I bought a computer with it from pcclub.com....and read up some on the whole thing...I think I just googled about SLI before I bought so not sure exactly where I read,I just read all over and went with it....it played DOOM 3 on it's ultra High setting that they did not recemond setting it to...the whole game thru flawlessly....and the expansion pack.:up: ...just got Oblivion for Christmas and set it to highest setting and so far so good.

[JU_88]

if its an nforce 4 chips set and you have two 16x PCI E slots then YES!
To be honest you should punch your mobos model number in to google to get more info.

But as Perilscope rightly pointed out, your cards must be SLI compatible, to check this look to see if they have contacts on the outermost side for the SLI bridge (which you will also need - and should have been supplied with your Mobo)

http://www.overclockers.ru/images/lab/2005/01/19/sli-cards.jpg

[tycho102]

Crossfires take a very limited number of boards. There's like 3 to choose from, both mainboard and video card.

SLI is supported by NF4 and above, but the mainboard has to have the slots. And you've got to have cards with the little SLI connection on top. If you look at your mainboard, you might see a small "card" insert between two of the long slots. Newer boards have the ability to forgo the physical switch for a BIOS switch.

The two long slots with a locking-tab at the end are PCIe 16x slots (although they are probably really 8x slots in SLI mode).
http://www.amdzone.com/pics/motherboards/epox/8npa%20sli/slots.jpg

[The Munster]

Thanks for the help guys, especially the photographs; I will peel open my box of tricks during the holidays and take a note of everything. Cheers. :D

[nightdagger]

But the chipset has to be a SLI chipset for SLI to work: plenty of motherboards have dual slots but no SLI. Another thing to keep in mind is not all cards require the SLI bridge. Lower end cards can use the PCIe bus to communicate between each other.