Basic question: I don't actually NEED two video cards in 680i, right?

[Providence]

For the moment I just want to use my 8800GTS until the next gen cards come out to run SLi...I've got two Dell 2405FPW's and I do a lot of gaming, so I'd like to keep SLi as an option as opposed to buying an X38 board.

Which in and of itself is confusing because I've been doing so research and X38 boards I've seen have two or three PCIx16 slots...but some kind of Intel screwup won't let me use multiple Nvidia graphics cards? Anyway I'd like to stick with 680i if at all possible...

Just wanted to make sure I can just run one card in it for a while; was thinking about getting Evga's A1 680i. Buying a QX9650 soon to put in it, but it seems there are BIOS problems at the moment. The plan is to water cool it around 4.0 GHz, btw...

 

[farfromhome]

Yes, a single card runs just fine on a SLI motherboard. I had a nForce4 SLI socket 939 board with one graphics card for quite a while myself, in fact. Keep in mind that multiple monitors and SLI are mutually exclusive though; you can't run both SLI and multiple monitors at the same time. (Theoretically, you could run SLI with 2 nVidia cards on one monitor and have an ATI card for the other monitor, but I doubt that's what you were intending.) That's one of the few advantages of Crossfire to SLI BTW; I believe it can do both at the same time.

As to why you must get a motherboard with a nVidia chipset in order to run SLI: nVidia wants to make money on chipsets, pure and simple, and won't license out the SLI technology to anybody else. There's no technical reason why any board with enough PCI express lanes in the proper configuration can't run SLI (or AMD/ATI Crossfire for that matter). AMD/ATI, on the other hand, was willing to license Crossfire to Intel, hence Intel chipsets being able to run Crossfire just fine (which is why there are so many PCI express slots on X38 boards...).

 

[Providence]

Something I saw in an X38 review:

"The main peculiarity of the Intel X38 chipset is the support of two PCI Express x16 graphics card slots each having 16 “real” PCI Express lanes. This is the first Intel chipset boasting this feature. In other words, Intel X38 supports the fastest modification of AMD Crossfire technology. As for the SLI technology implementation on Intel based mainboards, Nvidia continues to provide no support for it in the drivers, although nothing on the hardware level prevents this technology from working perfectly fine on Intel X38 based platforms."

So it may support SLi one day?

 

[sabregen]

Something I saw in an X38 review:

"The main peculiarity of the Intel X38 chipset is the support of two PCI Express x16 graphics card slots each having 16 “real” PCI Express lanes. This is the first Intel chipset boasting this feature. In other words, Intel X38 supports the fastest modification of AMD Crossfire technology. As for the SLI technology implementation on Intel based mainboards, Nvidia continues to provide no support for it in the drivers, although nothing on the hardware level prevents this technology from working perfectly fine on Intel X38 based platforms."

So it may support SLi one day?

Or, if you can find and/or hack the SLI drivers yourself, you could do it now. I know there's people that have run SLI on Intel chipsets with hacked drivers, I believe a 9xx series chipset, although I cannot recall which ones.