Real story on Intel X38 and SLI graphics

There has been numerous reports floating around the web that Intel's upcoming X38 enthusiast chipset motherboard will officially support not only AMD Crossfire dual graphics but also Nvidia SLI technology.

We heard plenty of those rumors ourselves from one source to the next and at one point, we were even so sure it was going to happen we even started saying you could probably look forward to X38 supporting SLI. Sadly though, all these rumors are untrue!

During Computex back in June of this year, a couple motherboard companies slipped up and claimed that their X38 boards would support SLI. Technically and as far as the hardware goes, X38 does support SLI but it is not officially sanctioned at all by Nvidia. During a drunken Taipei rampage last year in a place which will be left unnamed, we asked the question to an Nvidia senior rep who is high up on the food chain and the answer was something along the lines of that Intel would never get a SLI license unless Intel gave them a free CPU bus license in return (loosely quoted). Of course, neither are likely to ever happen.


One of the companies during Computex highlighting the fact that their X38 would support SLI was Foxconn. We were able to get hold of a Foxconn rep for comment who mentioned it was a slip up and Nvidia got angry at them. The real reason they mentioned it was because X38 can physically support SLI just there is nothing official from the Nvidia side - and of course, we are talking about drivers. Some motherboard companies believe that end-users (famous overclockers) are close to easily modding Nvidia drivers to support SLI on any platform.

As the educated would know, even now there are some modded SLI drivers floating around in certain forums to support SLI on some older Intel chipset boards but those drivers are very outdated and do not support the current bread GeForce 8xxx series. So, for all of you out there hoping that X38 will have official support for SLI, you are sadly mistaken. If you want to run SLI on X38, like many will likely have wet dreams about, you won't be using official drivers from Nvidia anytime soon.

It is a shame for users and it would really make X38 the truly ultimate platform but at the same time, if Nvidia gives SLI to Intel, their chipset business goes down the toilet, all the way down.