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Scalable Link Interface

As you understand by now the mainboard is SLI ready, you can choose to use one graphics card or combine two Series 6 or 7 SLI compatible graphics cards to link them up and give that 3D gaming experience some more raw horsepower. Right now you need to bare in mind that only the GeForce 6600 GT, 6800 LE/GT/Ultra and 7800 GT/GTX are SLI compatible.

Bare in mind that it's advised to buy the cards from the exact same card from the same manufacturer. You better be sure to have a high-end processor in your PC. And with High-end I really mean Athlon 64 3400+ or equivalent, which I consider to be the bare minimum. When you have a SLI capable solution active rendering can take place in three modes. If your game is not supported automatically Single GPU rendering will be enabled, which effectively is one GeForce 6800 GT or whatever cards you have running. When the game does support SLI then the driver will select the best SLI mode, which is either Alternate (AFR) or Split Frame (SFR) rendering. Read one of our extensive SLI reviews to get a more decent picture of settings and explanation please.

Albatron researched and developed a smart solution which digitally detects if two SLI graphics cards are installed in the red PCI-E slots. If so it'll split the PCI Express x16 bus evenly between the two slots and thus create the the 8x/8x PCI Express configuration. The blue slots are PCI Express 1x slots and the two white ones your normal PCI slots. The digital switch works flawlessly.

You'll receive a SLI bridge with the mainboard.

Hardware and Software Used

Now we begin the benchmark portion of this article, but first let me show you our test system plus the software and hardware we used.

Mainboard

Albatron K8SLI,motherboard, nForce4 SLI, Socket 939

Processor

AMD Athlon 64 4000+, Socket 939
AMD Athlon 64 FX-57, Socket 939

Graphics Cards

GeForce 7800 GT (PCX) 256 MB, NVIDIA reference SLI
 

Memory

1024 MB (2x512MB) DDR1 - PC-3200 2.5-3-3-7

Software

Windows XP Professional SP2
NVIDIA nForce4 Platform Driver 6.39
DirectX 9.0c End User Runtime
Catalyst 5.7
ForceWare 77.77
RivaTuner 2.0 (tweak utility)

SiSoft Sandra 2005
Everest 2.0
PCMark 2004
MP3 Encoding