Triple SLI Flawed?
Posted: Wed Dec 05, 2007 9:29 pm
The Inq has brought up a few interesting points about NVIDIA 3-way or Triple SLI today in this post. If you're too lazy to read it I copy/pasted it below.
Here is the circuit diagram that was leaked on the nvidia 780i:If you look at a circuit diagram of the 780i, you see one very standout part, the PCIe slots.
It goes something like this, and the NV diagrams, like everything that comes out of the company, is really vague and meant to make you draw the wrong conclusion. The problem is that two of the PCIe 16x slots are PCIe2 and one is PCIe1. Hmmmm. The PCIe2 slots are connected to the north bridge via a chip called the Nforce 200 bridge chip. This is rumoured to be one of the things they still haven't managed to get completely functional yet.
The one 16x PCIe1 slot may or may not be connected to the south bridge, the diagrams are purposely misleading here. In the end, you have 2 PCIe2 links 2 hops from the NB, and one PCIe1 link one hop from the SB.
See a latency problem? Thouight so. To make matters more humourous, how well do you think the third card does four hops away from the other two while running at half the speed? We sense problems in the making, do you? This could quite possibly be why the 780i and 3SLI are so delayed and fraught with problems.
