Three-way SLI on the horizon with the nForce 680/780/790 chipsets
Written by Andreas G 28 September 2007 09:14

After a very short-lived period of Quad SLI, NVIDIA seems to have decided that the idea of more than two graphics cards working together is still a working concept. Quad SLI was really nothing more than an attempt to get as many headlines as possible, but that was partially because it only worked with the dual-PCB card GeForce 7950GX2. A card which was rather limited in supply, while the QUAD SLI itself didn't scale all that well in many applications, compared to regular SLI. However the idea of running more than two cards together could certainly work if you could do it with any three cards, or at least a fairly common card.

The first rumors of a 3-way SLI solution appeared back in Fenruary, but the talk died off and nothing more was really heard after that, except small notes on a slide here and there, but no one really cared by then as the actual support was missing, despite the three PCIe 16x slots of all current nForce 680i motherboards.

According to Chinese site Expreview, the coming 7 series chipsets from NVIDIA will introduce the possibility of running three cards in SLI (translated via Google). This will (of course) be limited to the high-end chipset 780i SLI and 780a SLI, but it also seems that the current 680i will get 3-way SLI support through a driver update before the end of the year. NVIDIA defines it as "The Next Generation Ultimate Gaming Platforms" and will extend the support to the later coming 790i.

In a similar article they've found an interesting chip residing on a motherboard using the 780i MCP/chipset. The chip seems to be a PCI Express bridge, and this could possibly be for the 3-way SLI. According to sources to Expreview the chip sports 16x bandwidth upstream and two PCI Express 16x, or four PCI Express 8x, or one PCI Express x16 and two PCI Express 8x downstream.

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