Those who wants to invest in AMD’s new Socket AM2 platform and be sure to support NVIDIA’s SLI technology there are today two options. A motherboard based on the nForce 590 SLI or nForce 570 SLI chipsets. That was at least the status when AMD’s platform was launched a few weeks ago, but now new information says that you can activate the SLI support on the lower end chipsets, nForce 550 and nForce 570, as well, just as you could with NVIDIA’s nForce4 series. It’s the Chinese hardware site HKEPC that has bumped into a motherboard from the manufacturer Magic-Pro which sport nForce 550 chipset and SLI from scratch.
It has done very thorough check of the motherboard and compared it to several other nForce 5xx-based models to see what differences there were. This resulted in that they first removed a resistor from the chipset, but that didn’t help. They also had to remove several other resistors close to the PCI Express x16 slots on the motherboard, MSI K9N Platinum with the nForce 570 chipset. Finally they got SLI working and with identical performance as the nForce 570 SLI chipset.
These are not the easiest modifications one can do and the difference in price between nForce 570 and 570 SLI-based motherboards are tops $20-$30. But they have at least shown that it is possible to modify a motherboard to engage SLI.
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