nVidia SLI cracked - works on all motherboards now?

[Picard]

We just got contacted by a friend of the site that inform us that Chinese xDev site managed to reverse engineer the SLI verification procedure and now SLI works everywhere. In case you didn't knew, nVidia charges motherboard vendors five dollars [US$5] per motherboard if the motherboard is to support GeForce SLI. In terms of Quadro SLI, the company charges more and it only certifies complete systems, rather than motherboards. We suspect that this is what keeps an iron fist on the Quadro board market, where nVidia captured over 90% of the market.

But the main issue with SLI is the fact that there aren't many AMD motherboards on the market supporting SLI, and renaming nForce 780a into 980a SLI was well… a closely followed pattern by nVidia in the past 24 months, with more rebrands than new ASICs.

Well, not anymore. According to Chinese xDev website, they found two ways how to activate SLI on ALL multi-GPU supporting motherboards, regardless of the chipset in place [but you have to have a minimum of two closed or open-ended PCIe slots fitting the graphics cards].

They've tried and tested SLI on 16 motherboards, from the oldest P965 and P35 to new AMD 790X chipsets and it worked every time. From graphics cards side, the team had pairings of nVidia GeForce 6600LE, 6800Ultra, 7900GS, 8800GTX, 9800GT, 9800GTX, GTX260-192, GTX260-216 and GTX285. The guys checked to see if their method works on 32-bit versions of Windows XP, Vista & 7 and 64-bit versions of Vista and Windows 7. In each and every case, the SLI worked.

Now, there are two ways to achieve this hack. From one side, you can use modified drivers but that method requires a hacking and tweaking each and every time you install a new driver. But there is a second method that allows you to install newer drivers - by replacing HAL [Hardware Abstraction Layer] and cheating the operating system about the motherboard chipset you have.

You can read the whole guide in this following link: xDev: Activating SLI on all motherboards, detailed HOW-TO [Chinese]. Even though if you aren't interested in performing such an operation, it is an interesting read. For those readers that can't read Chinese, you can read the English translation - Google Translate: xDev: Activating SLI on all motherboards, detailed HOW-TO.
In the end, the credit goes to the author and programmer of modification SveetSnelda, HAL.dll modified anatolymik

Source

[doctor]

Hahah kako su prsli ej... Sjajno jos da imam dva PCIe slota

[Beagle]

doctor kaže:

Hahah kako su prsli ej... Sjajno jos da imam dva PCIe slota

I odma ces da kupis novu grafulju?

SLI se nikada nikome nije isplatio, tako da je zakljucak evidentan

[player1]

Ovo samo pokazuje da SLI funkcionalnost skoro nema nikakve veze sa hardverom, nego da je cista otimacina para.

[Mickie]

player1 kaže:

Ovo samo pokazuje da SLI funkcionalnost skoro nema nikakve veze sa hardverom, nego da je cista otimacina para.

To se odavno zna. Prvo se se vadili na Post-Write Shortcut koji imaju samo nForce cipsetovi, posle je to cudo postalo sastavni deo PCI-E 2.0 spec, a nVidia je samo cutala. Nisu vise pominjali nista kao izgovor.