Language Selection

English French German Italian Portuguese Spanish

AMD SLI vs Intel SLI

Filed under
Hardware
Reviews

This year has seen the arrival of many new interesting technologies such as PCI Express and DDR2. Yet to this day SLI still remains by far the most hyped about technology. SLI was designed by NVIDIA and allows two select graphics cards to work together. The ability to link two powerful NVIDIA graphics cards together does sound impressive. However I believe that the most important reason that NVIDIA has received so much attention is because they were the first to deliver AMD followers with PCI Express technology.

They did this with the nForce4 chipset series which of course does come in an SLI flavor. SLI (Scalable Link Interface) allows a single system to combine two NVIDIA graphics cards to scale system performance. This technology takes advantage of the increased bandwidth of the PCI Express bus. Currently the ability to operate the GeForce 6600 GT, 6800, 6800 GT and 6800 Ultra in SLI mode is possible. The two cards are linked together using what is known as a bridge chip.

While this technology has the power to almost double the frame rates when operating in SLI mode, you have to remember it will also cost twice as much to use. For example, a GeForce 6800 Ultra SLI setup will cost around $1000 US for the graphics cards alone. This technology is however reasonably good value for GeForce 6600 GT setups, as it will cost no more than $400 US for the graphics cards. The nForce4 chipset series has already become hugely successful for a number of reasons. First and foremost they bring PCI Express support to the AMD64 platform and they do this by offering a flexible upgrade path.

Although SLI enabled motherboards do hold a fair price premium, their unique abilities are worth this price penalty. This is evident through the 750,000+ nForce4 chipsets already sold by NVIDIA. In order to utilize SLI technology there is currently only one chipset that will give a motherboard this support. Known as the NVIDIA "nForce4 SLI", this chipset supports a whole host of new and exciting features. The nForce4 series looks to be the best NVIDIA chipset creation yet. Until recently the nForce4 SLI chipset only included AMD 939-pin support. However, the chipset has been re-released with support for the Intel LGA775 platform.

The chipset still goes by the same model name; now there is simply an AMD and Intel version. The list of supported features is very extensive, covering everything from SLI support to built-in firewalls. Initially some motherboard manufacturers were unhappy with the Intel Edition SLI chipset performance, saying that it was nothing like the AMD version. However, since then Gigabyte, ASUS and MSI just to name a few, have been sampling Intel Edition SLI motherboards. The results have been good, leaving us to wonder who really does offer the best SLI performance, AMD or Intel.

Full Review.

More in Tux Machines

digiKam 7.7.0 is released

After three months of active maintenance and another bug triage, the digiKam team is proud to present version 7.7.0 of its open source digital photo manager. See below the list of most important features coming with this release. Read more

Dilution and Misuse of the "Linux" Brand

Samsung, Red Hat to Work on Linux Drivers for Future Tech

The metaverse is expected to uproot system design as we know it, and Samsung is one of many hardware vendors re-imagining data center infrastructure in preparation for a parallel 3D world. Samsung is working on new memory technologies that provide faster bandwidth inside hardware for data to travel between CPUs, storage and other computing resources. The company also announced it was partnering with Red Hat to ensure these technologies have Linux compatibility. Read more

today's howtos

  • How to install go1.19beta on Ubuntu 22.04 – NextGenTips

    In this tutorial, we are going to explore how to install go on Ubuntu 22.04 Golang is an open-source programming language that is easy to learn and use. It is built-in concurrency and has a robust standard library. It is reliable, builds fast, and efficient software that scales fast. Its concurrency mechanisms make it easy to write programs that get the most out of multicore and networked machines, while its novel-type systems enable flexible and modular program constructions. Go compiles quickly to machine code and has the convenience of garbage collection and the power of run-time reflection. In this guide, we are going to learn how to install golang 1.19beta on Ubuntu 22.04. Go 1.19beta1 is not yet released. There is so much work in progress with all the documentation.

  • molecule test: failed to connect to bus in systemd container - openQA bites

    Ansible Molecule is a project to help you test your ansible roles. I’m using molecule for automatically testing the ansible roles of geekoops.

  • How To Install MongoDB on AlmaLinux 9 - idroot

    In this tutorial, we will show you how to install MongoDB on AlmaLinux 9. For those of you who didn’t know, MongoDB is a high-performance, highly scalable document-oriented NoSQL database. Unlike in SQL databases where data is stored in rows and columns inside tables, in MongoDB, data is structured in JSON-like format inside records which are referred to as documents. The open-source attribute of MongoDB as a database software makes it an ideal candidate for almost any database-related project. This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the MongoDB NoSQL database on AlmaLinux 9. You can follow the same instructions for CentOS and Rocky Linux.

  • An introduction (and how-to) to Plugin Loader for the Steam Deck. - Invidious
  • Self-host a Ghost Blog With Traefik

    Ghost is a very popular open-source content management system. Started as an alternative to WordPress and it went on to become an alternative to Substack by focusing on membership and newsletter. The creators of Ghost offer managed Pro hosting but it may not fit everyone's budget. Alternatively, you can self-host it on your own cloud servers. On Linux handbook, we already have a guide on deploying Ghost with Docker in a reverse proxy setup. Instead of Ngnix reverse proxy, you can also use another software called Traefik with Docker. It is a popular open-source cloud-native application proxy, API Gateway, Edge-router, and more. I use Traefik to secure my websites using an SSL certificate obtained from Let's Encrypt. Once deployed, Traefik can automatically manage your certificates and their renewals. In this tutorial, I'll share the necessary steps for deploying a Ghost blog with Docker and Traefik.