SLI and CrossFire?
Multi-GPU support - CrossFireX and SLIThere's out-of-the-box support for all single-GPU cards, of course, and AMD's CrossFireX that's carried on over from X48 and previous Intel chipsets. What's interesting this time is NVIDIA will be adding SLI support to various boards without the need for the additional nF200 bridging chip - you simply slot up-to three cards in to pre-approved boards and away you go.
Right now, X58 SLI support is provided for select ASUS, DFI, Gigabyte, EVGA and MSI boards. NVIDIA receives a few dollars from its partners to enable the support via an SBIOS update.
By doing this, NVIDIA has effectively culled the sales' promise for any boards equipped with the costly NF200 chip, unless the motherboard partner is interested in adding even more lanes to the chipset.
The southbridge
X58's IOH will only be paired with the ICH10/R southbridge that we first saw with the P45 chipset earlier this year.
Because graphics cards, the heavy-bandwidth users, are run off the IOH, Intel feels as if there's little reason to have an ultra-high-speed link between chipset bridges. The X58-to-ICH10 link is kept to 2GB/s (DMI).
ICH10's main claim to fame over previous-generation ICH9 lies with respect to frugal power consumption and provision for Turbo Memory, although we've seen precious few motherboard manufacturers take that up.
Six PCIe lanes are common fare, albeit only ver. 1.0, and Intel continues to add in an integrated Ethernet MAC, although, again, most manufacturers tend to run with external integrated solutions from the likes of Realtek and Broadcom.
Musings
Intel's X58 chipset should make for a cheaper-to-produce board than, say, X48, simply because the northbridge has now been stripped of memory-controller duties. However and unfortunately, we don't expect this to be the case as most X58-based boards will feature everything but the kitchen sink, with the chipset augmented by FireWire, eSATA, high-end audio, enhanced power-delivery circuitry and bespoke cooling.
Expect the initial batch to cost north of £150 as Intel charges a huge premium for folks wishing to jump on the Core i7 bandwagon. It can do so, too, as X58, for a while, will be the only supporting core logic for the triumvirate of processors.
