NVIDIA SLI

By now just about everyone has heard of SLI and what the technology represents, but in that rare instant for those of you who haven't, welcome to Scalable Link Interface or SLI. SLI incorporates the use of a SLI ready motherboard such as the DFI nF4 SLI-DR and two SLI ready graphics processing units, such as the Gainward 6600GT GS GLH and we happen to have both in hand and will give you a first hand look. Now on to DFI's SLI solution...

DFI's  SLI Solution

DFI utilizes the nForce 4 SLI chipset which is the center of the DFI LANParty nF4 SLI-DR mother-board. This nForce 4 MCP gives us the SLI technology we see here today by allowing two video cards to linked together for twice the 3D power. Not only does the nF4 MCP allow SLI operations, it is the central motherboard processor that controls almost all functionality of the DFI LANParty nF4 SLI-DR has to offer. DFI includes a proprietary connector that is part of the DFI LANParty nF4 SLI-DR mother-board bundle. The SLI connector is a specific size that fits the DFI LANParty nF4 series supporting SLI. Let's take a look and test fit a couple of Gainward 6600 GT GS GLH's and give a go at SLI.

To enable SLI you have to set the VGA select, so the jumpers enable SLI. Then you will install two SLI enabled video cards and using the SLI connector you will physically attach both cards together for SLI functionality.

The next step is installing the video card(s). Installing the SLI enabled cards is a rather easy task, we are going to stuff the first card to the (PCIE1) PCI Express expansion slot, followed by stuffing the second into (PCIE4) or slot number four. As you can see it fits nicely in the yellow slot on the LANParty nF4 SLI-DR mainboard.

Once the card is installed we can see that it's PCB is covering a bit the cooler that is placed on the NVIDIA nForce4 chipset. In our case with one card inserted this doesn't causes any issue, there is still enough room in between the heatsink on the PCB. And this is in fact the same as for all nForce4 chipset based mainboards.

When the second card is installed, we should note how close the PCB of the graphics cards comes to the top of the active heatsink covering the nForce4 SLI MCP. Here is where we run into a bit of an issue, if you press these cards into the PCIe slot to far, the cards will cause the SLI MCP heat sink and fan to run out of clearance and the bottom of the video card can get hung up on the SLI MCP cooling fan. The solution is to slightly pull the graphics cards out of the slot enough to give just enough clearance for safe normal operation.

A closer view on the side of the mainboard that will make connection to the monitor. From this angle we can see that there is enough room between the two video cards for SLI operations. When applying the same setup with two GeForce 6800 Ultra this would certainly be more crowded and a good air circulation should be taken into consideration. This is why we like the single slot solution the Gainward cards provide us.

The top view shows how both cards are connected to each other using the SLI Bridge from DFI. The connector is ambidextrous, in that it can be installed with the logo facing either direction. The SLI connector works on any SLI ready GPU, so no additional connectors are needed for supporting cards.

Here we see both cards installed and ready to be used. What can I say? Isn't it colorful? With the colored expansion slots on the DFI LANParty nF4 SLI-DR and the Gainward graphics cards, it does make a nice combination. Remaining are still the memory modules and the processor to be installed and then we are ready to give this board some juice.

This is a full blown SLI ready configuration. I think it's time we stuff the CPU and memory in this bad boy and see what kind of performance and experience we can get out of this thing, let's got check out the processor we are going to use...